“Did you need anything else?” he asked, leaning against the counter beside me but somehow still blocking my escape.
“No.” I shook my head and let my gaze wander around the kitchen, trying to come up with something. “I just opened the dishwasher to toss in a few plates and saw it sitting there. It’s a weird place for a water filter. Right?”
Look, it’s the first thing I thought of at the time. Sue me.
A photo of two women standing side-by-side in front of Niagara Falls caught my attention. It had a prominent space in the middle of the freezer door with a Pluto magnet keeping it up. The Disney dog, not the planet.
“Selene’s sister, Samantha. They take a girl’s trip together every other year. She’s here often. You might see her around when you’re coming or going.” Casey tapped the edge of the fridge. His long, outstretched arm blocking any escape even more.
My heart registered my stuck condition but my eyes focused on something different. “They must be close.”
“As my mother used to say, ‘two peas, one pod.’” He had his attention on the photo, but I’d moved on to something more intriguing.
A few inches from the photo, a car mechanic’s promotional magnet held up the ripped off bottom portion of a piece of paper. It wasn’t the paper that caught my eye but the writing on it.
There’s something I need to tell you. Meet me for dinner at your favorite place.
“My mom,” Casey said, as he caught me staring at the paper. “It’s just a stupid little note, but it’s the last thing she ever said to me.”
I couldn’t rip my gaze away from the heavily slanted writing. It appeared like she’d written the note in a hurry, but I wasn’t a handwriting expert. “What did she want to tell you?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. She died before we had a chance to talk that night. We were going to meet for dinner at the bar on Bay Street. She thinks it’s my favorite place.”
My lips tipped up in response to the grin he started when mentioning the bar. There had to be a story there. I’d opened my mouth, ready to ask, when my phone vibrated at the same time his front door opened and closed.
“We’re in the kitchen,” Casey called as I lifted the phone, snapped a shot of the note on the fridge, and opened my texting app.
Exactly fifteen nanoseconds after Selene walked into the kitchen, I clocked how close Casey and I were standing to one another. We’d both worked our way over to stare at the fridge door, but it put us so close our shoulders were almost touching.
“Excuse me for just a second,” I said into my phone and used it as my chance to move closer to the back door—and my escape.
Casey was still my suspect numero uno, but the note made me reconsider a few things. A murderer didn’t keep his mother’s last hastily written note on his fridge. Unless he killed her on accident.
DELANEY: Why haven’t I seen pictures of the hot SEAL?
I swear she had the worst timing.
“How did you ever manage to leave your new hubby alone?” Selene asked as she lowered the lid on the trash can.
My nail scratched the skin at the top of my jeans as I shoved my phone in my back pocket. “He’s on a run. We do not agree on exercise routines,” I said around a laugh.
She didn’t match it. “Where did you two meet? Is it one of those super cute stories that you’ll tell your grandchildren about in thirty years?”
Thirty years for grandchildren? That seemed awful soon. I swallowed hard after doing the math. Selene and Casey stared in my direction. Crap, right? They wanted an answer.
Anxiety blossomed in my chest. Shit. How did Reed and I meet?
Oh shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.
The back door rattled next to me, and I jumped a foot in the air. A slight scream slipped past my lips, and I moved away, getting a look at the man through the slit in the window curtain. I released the breath I’d sucked in, but my body didn’t release the tension.
“How did you find me?” I asked Reed as I hurried over to open it for him.
He walked inside and gave the room a hard gaze before answering. His hair looked freshly showered, so he must not have been too worried. “Remember, we put those trackers on our phones?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. We definitely never agreed to put trackers on our phones. Did Delaney say he could track me? How’d he get it on my phone? “I guess I forgot.”
Selene laughed, interrupting the tense moment. “Oh no. That seems like trouble in a lover’s paradise. See, honey,” she said, giving Casey a slight slap on his shoulder. “It happens to everyone.”
