“Best thing I’ve had since—” But the statement dies on my tongue, because they’re the best thing since brownies with Jasper’s family in their kitchen, and while this pie is tasty, those brownies were special. As was the company.
“What?” Vee says.
“Nothing.” I shake my head.
“You got sad again.”
“It’s nothing.” Nothing I can talk about, anyway.
“Nothing makes you sad?”
“Nothing makes me...” I glare at my pie like it’s betrayed me.
“We both struggled after Farah died,” she says after a moment, making the wrong assumption, though it’s not her fault. As far as she knows, Jasper and I met once. Why would he be the one to consume my thoughts? “I should have been there for you more. But you had Ezekiel, and I could see how hard you were working, and I thought maybe it was for the best.”
It had been. I was happy with my life. At least until I met Jasper. Until suddenly I was solving mysteries and tangling with criminals instead of following the steps of the neat life I’d built for myself these past few years. Now I’m grieving all over again, and it’s like all that work meant nothing. It didn’t protect me any more than I protected Jasper.
I can’t do this alone. Not again. Ezekiel is locked away in the lab most of the time. He’s as safe as anyone can be from things like time loops and Indigo. But Vee’s right here, in this shrine of a diner, with people coming in and out all day. Indigo could walk through the front door, order a coffee, and zap her before she’d even finished writing his order down. Knowing she’d been out here without realizing the threat would hurt too much. I’ve ignored her for years and blamed her for something that was hardly her fault. I believed she failed my mother, but if the Legendary Flame couldn’t stop Indigo, what hope did a mere mortal like Vee have? She didn’t fail my mother, and I can’t fail her now.
“If I tell you something that sounds impossible, do you promise not to laugh?” I certainly want to laugh, because the question sounds like a child asking if they can share a secret. But maybe that’s what I am. Vee was always like a second mother to me. The grounded, earthly one while Mother went off on her missions and her jobs.
Vee’s hand twitches, and she goes to reach across the table to touch me, but I drop my own hands to my lap because I’m not ready for that. We may be talking, but I still have two years ofhurt and distance that I’ve been carrying around like a boulder. I can’t shrug all that off in an instant because she gave me pie.
She says, “Of course. You can tell me anything.”
So I tell her. Every detail. More than I told Ezekiel, because Vee was always the tactician. She listens quietly, the skin between her eyebrows pinched together in concentration. Sometimes she stops me and makes me go back, and I can sympathize with her “Wait. Was that the same day, or the day after?” because it’s so hard to keep straight, especially when you’re not living it.
Finally, she pushes back in her seat, arms crossed, bottom lip between her teeth. It’s her thinking face. I’ve known it since I was a child, and watching her process everything I’ve told her, I realize how much I’ve missed that face, along with so much else.
“So now you’re... what?” she says. “Going to build your own time machine so you can go back and rescue him before he dies?”
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. I shouldn’t have had so much coffee. My stomach burns and my headache is worse. “I don’t know. It doesn’t feel fair that I’m alive and he’s not.”
I expect her to tell me that’s normal. That we all feel that way when we’re grieving. And she’d be right. But instead, she chews on her bottom lip a moment longer before she says, “Can I show you something?”
And I can’t really say no, can I? Because I just dumped all of my time travelling trauma on her, so if she wants to off-load too, I’m really not in a position to refuse.
She gets up and heads toward the kitchen, and I follow, throwing a silent promise to the rest of the pie that I’ll be back soon. A cook in a greasy apron watches as we pass through, but she doesn’t appear too concerned by our appearance. Vee holds open a door at the back that leads to a narrow staircase goingdown. The smell of damp basement is apparent, and the light is dim, but I make my way, trying not to touch the walls, which look like they’re coated in about an inch’s worth of dust.
“I don’t think the health department would approve of this,” I say.
Vee laughs as she descends behind me. “That’s why I don’t let them come down here.”
At the foot of the stairs, the walls are lined with rows of shelves, holding mundane things like boxes of toilet paper, takeout containers, and napkins. But Vee leads me past them and then down a constricted hallway where the ceiling is so low I have to bend so I don’t brush my head on the bare light bulbs strung above us.
“Have you been building a secret superhero hideout down here all this time?” I ask.
Vee grins over her shoulder at me. “Something like that.”
At the end is another door. This one is made of heavy metal, with a large latch, like some kind of walk-in refrigerator.
“Is this where you stash the bodies?” I ask.
Vee taps to the side of her nose with a wink. She pulls the handle and the door swings open with a groan, puffing up new clouds of dust.
Inside, the air is warmer than I expect, which is to say it’s the same temperature as the rest of the basement instead of the refrigerated chill I’d anticipated. Vee turns on the overhead light by tugging on a pull chain. I blink in the brightness, only to be completely distracted by the chaos in front of me.
“Whaaat?” Where there should be shelves of food, there are walls that are covered with paper. News clippings. Maps. Lists and lists. “What is this?” Maybe my joke about a secret hideout is more on the nose than I thought.
