My heart thundered and beat against my rib cage. No one but Riley ever called me Cass.
“Ry,” I said, using his nickname too. It was only fair.
“What are you doing in town?” Katy asked, and from the quickness in her voice, we were getting ready for a Katy inquisition. More than likely, she’d only honed her skills over the years.
It was best to keep the details as light as possible. My mother might have a conniption if this conversation made the phone tree or ended up in the paper. She played along with everyone else and would gossip about anyone in town, but she never wanted the attention on her own family.
I still heard how I left after high school and was the talk of the town for an entire week. Thankfully, the neighbors were caught hosting a swingers’ club for out-of-town residents and took the focus off my indiscretions. I never figured out if the horror was because they were swingers or that they were doing it without-of-towners.
“I’m here for a few days to take care of Henry’s cat.” It was an honest but simple answer. Technically Whispers was my brother’s new wife’s cat, but it was a lot quicker to just say he belonged to Henry. They were married now, so it wasn’t a lie. I didn’t have time for explanations. I needed to get the hell out of the store.
Of course, Katy saw through my answer in an instant. Her eyebrows narrowed, and she turned her head slightly to the side. “What about your mom? She’s local.”
Stay out of the phone tree, Cassandra.
Yes, why wasn’t my mother watching Whiskers? That was definitely a phone-tree-worthy story. “Oh well, you know Mom. She’s not really happy with her only son eloping.”
It’s the truth. A watered-down condensed, much nicer version of the truth, but the truth.
In reality, my mother hated my brother’s new wife. She refused to acknowledge the wedding, and she absolutely refused to drive the six blocks to Henry’s house to feed the cat. Plus, my sister-in-law worried Whiskers might be uncomfortable from my mother’s hostility. She had a decent point.
My family wasn’t one of those nice ones who tried to work through their issues or apologized quickly. One time they messed up my mother’s order at the diner and even though they gave her two free meals to make up for it, she still refused to eat there ever again.
It might not seem like an enormous deal if you lived in a big city, but once the diner made her “no-go list” she had to drive all the way to Clearwater if she wanted a sandwich or make one in her own kitchen. My mother nursed the grudge since she was twenty-six. My father insisted the diner did not mess up her order and that my mother ordered the wrong meal in her sleep-deprived state after just giving birth to me a month earlier, but she didn’t believe him.
They’d argued over it ever since. It was on a long list of continued grievances they both carried for the other one, but neither saw fit to get divorced. Both seemed happy to live unhappily ever after.
“Well, that’s nice of you,” Katy said, but she stared at me hard as if she wanted to dig out the rest of the gossip in the story. My lips stayed sealed.
I suggested they board the cat, but Henry wouldn’t hear of it, so I ended up using fourteens days of the eighty-three vacation days I banked over the years to cat sit. I needed a vacation. I just never planned for it to be in Pelican Bay with Whiskers.
“Well, I need to get going,” I said, flicking my wrist to turn my watch on and nodding, even though it didn’t light up with the time. “I think the cat wants her afternoon snack. I just need to check out with this and I can see you later. Have a good afternoon.”
The aisle we stood in was chock-full of bedroom instruments like used hairbrushes and even an assortment of pillows, probably where the moth ball smell emanated. I grabbed the first semi-attractive thing my eyes landed on—an old music jewelry box—and turned on a heel to walk toward the checkouts.
My brother and his new wife just got their first wedding gift.
3
RILEY
“Don’t you have access to high-tech face-recognition software or something?” Katy asked as she laced up her running shoes. Not that I’d ever admit this to her because I liked having my balls attached to my body, but I didn’t know she owned a pair of running shoes.
They looked brand new. Suspicious.
“No,” I lied. No way in hell would I give Katy the power to use Ridge’s face recognition software. He had most of the town on lockdown with cameras. It’d be putting a loaded weapon in her hands, and even our friendship had limits.
Katy sat on her couch and stared out the window, tapping her finger against her front tooth. “How do we know when she leaves the house?”
“I guess you won’t.” As much as I wanted to track Cassandra’s every move now that she was in Pelican Bay, we couldn’t. It’d be a total misuse of software and an invasion of her privacy.
That didn’t mean I hadn’t considered it every minute of the day since we saw her yesterday in the antique shop. She was flustered, but I noticed she didn’t wear any rings, especially on a certain finger.
I had that information, but I enjoyed getting confirmation that the stalking I’d done over the years was true. The few sentences we shared weren’t enough. I wanted to learn everything about Cassandra now that she’d returned.
In that short amount of time, those old feeling I carried for her at one time came rushing forward. Feelings I thought I’d sufficiently removed. The ones I’d worked hard to shove away in a box at the back of my brain and then piled other women on top.
It took one look at Cassandra for her to bust through all the defenses I put in place to keep her safely locked away.
