She sat across from me. “Yeah. Sure. I can tell.”
A small dish with a pastry landed in front of me. “You’re not allowed to speak until this plate is clean,” Meara said.
A significant part of me wanted to sprint to my car and break every traffic law on the books to get to Sunny’s house right now, though a much smaller, much less compelling part knew her friends wouldn’t let anything happen to her. They wouldn’t leave her alone if she was unwell.
With this knowledge clutched in my fist, I inhaled the scone. It was more like the idea of a scone formed entirely by chocolate chips. Then I demolished a plate of vegan scrambled eggs, which seemed extremely contradictory but tasted better than the mess I’d left on the stove this morning.
Two cups of cold brew coffee later, Meara set a bag on the table, saying, “Much better.”
“Thanks,” I said, more than a little humbled by my whole fucking life right now.
She flicked the bag with a black fingernail. “These are for Sunny and the pups. Tell her we miss her but we don’t want her back until she feels better.” She shook her braids off her shoulders. “Believe me when I say I don’t want to see you stumble into this café looking like something the cat dragged in ever again.”
“Check your facts. Stumbling did not occur.”
“I don’t know what you did to yourself but you have the grace of Frankenstein’s monster,” she replied. “It goes beautifully with the dead eyes and misbuttoned shirt.”
“I’ll add it to the list of things I need to fix today.” I reached for my wallet. “What do I owe you?”
She scoffed. “Do not insult me with questions like that. Go. Out. On your way.”
Still holding her gaze, I dropped several twenties in the tip jar. “Do you abuse everyone who comes into Sunny’s life this much?”
She lifted one delicate shoulder and tipped her chin up. “Yes.”
I nodded. “Good.”
I didn’t break that many laws on the drive to Sunny’s house although that was only because there was no traffic in the heart of Friendship this morning and both of the stop lights turned green as I approached. But the smooth sailing ended there because she didn’t answer the door.
My initial reaction was that Meara must’ve tipped her off and she didn’t want to see me. To which I responded with a flurry of text messages that went unread after twelve full minutes while I paced on the sidewalk. Enough time to allow for most anything. Then I realized something had to be wrong. Sunny wasn’t mean, she wasn’t vindictive. She wouldn’t ignore me—unless something had happened and she couldn’t come to the door.
I hit up the doorbell again and fired off a few more texts but my tolerance for the unknown was inch-deep right now. I tried the door but it was locked—excellent—but that led me to the discovery that I didn’t have a key.Whydidn’t I have a key? I needed a key. Specifically for situations like this one. We’d remedy that very soon. Right after confirming she was alive and well and bizarrely incapable of hearing the doorbellandseeing texts. And after we remedied all the other things.
Since I wasn’t getting anywhere with the door, I jogged around the side of the house, thinking I’d be able to let myself into the backyard. Maybe I’d find her in the yard with the dogs or the back door would be open, and then my heart would be able to reacquaint itself with a normal rhythm for the first time today. Like all my other plans, this was practically foolproof—save for the singular issue of the backyard fence.
Now, I’d known the yard was fenced and I knew it was a tall fence because Jem was a jumper but I’d never considered whether I’d be able to climb it. To be fair, I didn’t evaluate whether I could climb much of anything and it had been a very long time since such a thing had crossed my mind but here the fuck I was now, wearing a suit and tie, bumbling around with exhausted muscles, and panicking my ass off.
My first attempt at vaulting myself over ended with a mouthful of grass and a serious dent in my pride. It didn’t matter whether anyone was watching becauseIsaw this and that was more than enough. The second attempt got me over but I ate grass again, I looked like I’d woodchucked my way through a garden, and I lost my glasses and phone for a minute. All that and I knew I’d have some weird bruises on my ass tomorrow.
I dragged myself to the back door. Also locked.
There was a minute where I debated prying off the screen over the bathroom window and climbing in from there but then I noticed the dog door.
It was the only option I had left, short of breaking down a door or falling headfirst into the bathroom. If this went south and I got stuck in there for—what? hours until Sunny came home?—she’d die laughing. She would laugh so hard she’d drop dead and I’d be the one to blame for it. With any luck, I’d go right along with her because I had no use for this world if she wasn’t in it too.
I knew then, and probably long before then, that finding a way to keep Sunny was the only problem I had to solve here. Nothing else mattered. Not Singapore, not my firm, not the mental health benefits of living far away from home.
Armed to the teeth with this knowledge, I learned that I could fit through a dog door but only if I went in at an angle, didn’t breathe, and lightly dislocated both shoulders. My shirt was ripped in several spots, my trousers too, and I was pretty sure my wallet fell out in the process, but I ended up sprawled on Sunny’s kitchen floor, heaving out breaths like I’d just lifted a car over my head, and wondering whether my bones were in the right places.
And that was when I noticed Sunny and her dogs staring at me like I’d materialized in her kitchen from another universe. She sat on her sofa with the dogs on either side of her, some kind of needle and thread in her hand. She pulled off a pair of big-ass headphones and blinked at me.
“You didn’t hear,” I panted, “when I knocked on the door. Or rang the doorbell. Many times. And I thought”—I rolled onto my back and pressed a hand to my heart—“I thought something was wrong. So I climbed the fence. Well, I fell over the fence. Then the door was locked. And the bathroom window was too high. And I saw the dog door.”
“You climbed the fence,” she said. “And decided to crawl through the dog door. These were thoughts that crossed your mind and then you decided to make them reality. These things seemed like a good idea to you.”
It took me a minute but I got to my feet and crossed the kitchen into the living room, and dropped down in front of Sunny. “Yes, because I needed to see you and make sure none of the worst-case scenarios in my head were coming true.” I set her sewing project on the floor and gathered her hands in mine. “I like you. A lot. It’s very uncomfortable for me. But it’s more uncomfortable when you’re not around or when you’re around but I’m not allowed to be near you. Let’s not do that ever again.”
She wrenched her hands free and scooted forward on the sofa, tucking me between her knees. “Then you won’t hiccup too hard next week and change your mind about everything for no reason?”
