“Sure,” she says. “If you don’t mind.”
I’m already pushing away from the table, my wallet in hand. “I’ll get it for you. What do you want?”
Abi blinks at me. “Um, how about an iced lavender latte?”
“Coming right up.”
It’s interesting how easy it is to fall into the role of Rowan Hanover when twelve hours earlier she was pressed against me, and I wasn’t Rowan Hanover at all.
I order her drink and wait for the barista to prepare it. When I come back to the table, Abi gives me a somewhat embarrassed smile. She’s scared, too. I can sense her fear as much as I can sense everyone else’s.
“Thanks for meeting me,” she says, stirring her drink around with the straw. “I know—I know it came out of nowhere, but I just...” She looks up at me, gnawing a little on her bottom lip. “I just wanted to talk to someone, and you seemed nice when we met the other day.”
An odd, wriggling feeling rolls through my chest. I think it might be guilt. After all, I’m not exactly who she thinks I am.
“I’m happy to talk,” I say, a million other questions bubbling around in my head. I know she doesn’t really have friends here in Rosado. I never see her going out with anyone. She certainly doesn’t go on dates. She spends her holidays alone, which has always worked out for me, since it means I don’t have to spend them alone, either.
But I want to knowwhy. That’s always been the missing piece.
“When you texted about the murder this morning,” she says, looking down at her latte. “I don’t know, I just needed to get out of my examination room. I?—”
She stops, and I feel something drifting off her, a hesitation and a whiff of lust, a ghost of what I felt last night. For a second, I think she might tell me about it.
Instead, she says, “I agreed to autopsy the victim.”
“Isn’t that what you do?” I ask carefully.
Abi looks up at me, her long side-swept bangs falling across the tops of her eyes. “Yeah,” she says. “But I knew her.”
I freeze, my fingers tightening around my coffee glass. “Who was she?” I say softly, before I can stop myself. But I need to know. This killer, I need to know everything I can about him, if only to keep my Abi safe.
Abi bites her lips, more hesitancy coming off her. “I probably shouldn’t say,” she murmurs. “But I’m going to. It’s gonna be in the papers soon enough anyway.”
I wait, watching her.
“She was a reporter.” Her voice is steely. “She lived in Magnolia.”
I don’t react. I don’t show Abi that I know what that means, that I know about her past.
“Her name was Olivia Pearce,” Abi continues, and I recognize the name immediately. I have copies of all the articles that Olivia wrote about Abi from back when I was a teenager, when Abi first moved to Rosado. All I knew about her was that she had killed someone and that she was beautiful. I wanted to understand everything I could about that kill, so I went to the library and pulled issues of the newspaper Olivia wrote for and copied anything that mentioned Abi’s name.
I still have those articles, too, tucked away in a file folder in my desk.
But of course I can’t let Abi know any of this. Rowan Hanover is a stranger to her.
“How’d you know her?” I say.
It’s the right response. Abi jerks her gaze to meet mine, and I feel a flutter of her excitement. A kind of—lightness. Or relief.
She thinks I don’t know about her past.
But I do know. And I really don’t fucking like that this interloper killed someone who helped clear Abi’s name ten years ago. I don’t like that this murder has any connection to Abi at all.
“She helped me out with something when I was younger,” Abi says carefully. “It’s not—it’s not important. But it freaked me out that she could—” Abi looks off to the side, her expression distant. “I’m sorry, I don’t want to dump all this on you. I just needed to be around another living person, and you?—”
“Seemed nice?” I offer. Abi smiles. Laughs a little.
“Yeah,” she says. “I mean, you had aBlood Raiser 3poster in your office. You seemed like someone—” She shrugs a little. “Someone I could be friends with.”
