“Hold on, let me google that name and jewelry boxes…”
Several seconds passed.
“Kell, check it out. This dude has an Etsy site. Look…”
Kelly saw a page filled with jewelry boxes and earrings.
One-of-a-kind, handmade items. Crafted by Emilio, an aspiring jewelry, clothing, and interior designer. Help him get to college by supporting this site.
“It’s not a twelve-year-old girl but a seventeen-year-old boy who made this!” Kelly said. “She lied to me. She bought it on Etsy. And she made me pay for lunch. What the hell was that all about then? She’s as full of shit as ever.”
“Does it surprise you that she lied to you?” Joel said. “Can we agree that the witch has used up her last chip? Never ever go near her again, no matter what line of BS she throws at you.”
“Oh I won’t, I am so done with her,” Kelly replied. “I truly can’t believe she lied about this one, why lie about a jewelry box?”
“You said yourself she isn’t crafty, but she probably wanted you to think she had worked so hard to make something with her own hands, as if it had more meaning that way, so she bought something but I guess didn’t notice the button with the signature.”
“Well I’m not keeping this thing. No way. I do hate to throw away someone’s hard work, though. What should we do with it?”
“I was planning to go to Goodwill with some old clothes soon. Let’s just throw it in that pile. Someone will like it, maybea twelve-year-old girl.” Joel laughed. “Come here, let me give you a hug. Trust is so important and you can’t trust her but we trust each other, don’t we?”
Kelly let herself fall into Joel’s arms and inhaled his earthy scent deeply. Then she let out a long, slow exhale. The lunch date she had dreaded was over. Faith was a confirmed liar and cheapskate but Kelly would never again have to deal with her.
She pushed it out of her mind for the rest of the day as she and Joel took a bike ride, made dinner, and went to the corner bar to meet up for a beer and darts with friends.
But that night lying in bed the lunch date came back to her. She couldn’t help but replay the whole conversation in her mind. Was there something she missed? Some ulterior motive Faith had in the meeting? Now that she was back to not trusting Faith, she was wary of everything. Had Faith really wanted to apologize and to give her a fake homemade jewelry box? Was that what this was all about? Because if she lied about the box, she could be lying about her apology too. It seemed insincere now. Kelly’s antennae were up.A liar is a liar to their core,she told herself.
Yet, Kelly had her purse with her the whole time, so Faith could not possibly have swindled anything out of her—except the forty-one dollars for lunch—and nothing else weird had happened. Still, Kelly had a gut feeling something was not quite adding up and she had better be wary moving forward.
CHAPTER TEN
Matthew
April
Matthew was alone in the office one weeknight when he noticed that his favorite baseball and his Channel 9 water bottle were both gone. The baseball was the one in the shiny glass holder that he had gotten as a child with his father at the Tigers game. The water bottle had a Detroit Pistons sticker on the side so he could differentiate it from others in the newsroom, identical water bottles all given out at the station Christmas party.
Matthew started scouring around. He looked in every drawer, under the desk, and all around it, but there was nothing. How could his favorite memento and a big metal water bottle just disappear? He began to feel frantic, rechecking the drawers he had just looked in and pushing some papers aside, although it made no sense for either to be under those papers. He would have noticed the bulging.
“This can’t be happening, where’s my baseball? My bottle?” he whispered to himself.
Dread started to wash over him. The water bottle, not a huge deal, he could ask for a replacement, but he couldn’t lose thatball, it meant so much to him. A baseball doesn’t just disappear. It had to be here somewhere…
And then a thought exploded in his head.
Faith. No way. Could it be?Could it?
Turning slowly toward her desk, he eyed it warily. Would there be any chance Faith took his stuff? As retribution for the lipstick, maybe, if she somehow was on to him. No, she couldn’t possibly know about that. It had been months since it happened and she hadn’t said anything or acted any more cold to him (she was cold enough as it was). But still…
He walked toward her desk, looking in disgust at how dirty and cluttered it was. Yet, he couldn’t really start shuffling things around or it would be super obvious that someone had. Maybe he could peek in the drawers.
Putting his fingers on the handle of one, he slowly slid it open. It was jam-packed with a huge assortment of random things: Tylenol, gum, mints, more makeup, hand sanitizer, various business cards, rubber bands, tape, a pair of scissors, and other crap. No baseball. No water bottle.
She had three other drawers, and he tried all of them, but two just had stacks of papers or old magazines and one was crammed with a similar collection of junk, this one more of the food variety, protein bars and her appetite-suppressing gum and Lipton’s Cup-a-Soup in a few flavors and some Red Bulls.
Matthew sighed. Nothing much to see here. He turned and looked at Abby’s and Chuck’s desks. No way they took his stuff. None of them were great buddies, but they wouldn’t stoop this low, would they?
Just in case, he quickly inspected all of the drawers in their desks but didn’t find anything of note. Theirs were way moreclean and organized than Faith’s, though, as he could have guessed.
