“I’m glad you came to get me, too.”
Indy stares at me, emotion working in his eyes.
Then he finally replies, “I am too.”
CHAPTER 7
INDY
“What areyou doing with all that food?”
I spin around to face a smirking Rafe, shopping bags swinging on my arm. He’s maybe fifteen feet down the hallway from me, a large bouquet of multicolored flowers clutched in his hand.
“What do you mean?” I ask. I glance at the bags stuffed close to overflowing, topped with ripe tomatoes and tri-colored peppers and a container of vivid spring greens. “Am I not allowed to buy food?”
As Rafe closes the distance between us, he eyeballs the visible contents of my bags, his gaze lingering on the vegetables and the bottle of extra virgin olive oil tucked beside them. “Of course you can buy food,” he replies. “I’m just not used to seeing you buy vegetables. Or anything fresh at all, really.”
I shoot him a quick glare. “I didn’t realize you were paying such close attention to my shopping habits.”
He cocks his head and gives me his patenteddon’t bullshit melook. “I don’t. But I’ve also known you for a long time. And I know damn well your idea of cooking consists of throwing afrozen dinner in the microwave. Orpossiblyheating up a can of soup. But actual vegetables? Olive oil?” He peers inside one of the bags. “And are those fresh herbs I see in there?”
“They’re not for me,” I admit. “They’re for Bea.”
Confusion creases his forehead. “Isn’t there plenty of food in the apartment already? I got everything on the list Eden gave me.”
“There is.” Easy to prepare stuff, like cold cuts and ready-made salads and the basics like eggs, cheese, bread, and milk. Things Bea could use to prepare basic meals, if she wanted to.
But. One of the things I remember most vividly about Bea is how much she likes to cook. She’d talk about it all the time during our sessions and though I never admitted it, listening to her chatter on about recipes was a welcome distraction from the pain that accompanied my exercises.
Which, now that I’m thinking back on it, was probably her intention.
“Bea likes to cook,” I explain. “Really cook. Fancy recipes and all that. So I thought having ingredients to cook with might help cheer her up.”
Rafe’s smirk fades. “How’s she holding up? That had to be tough on her, sitting through all our questions this morning.”
My jaw clenches at the memory of Bea sitting at the conference table in our meeting room, looking so small and uneasy and vulnerable it was all I could do not to pick her up and carry her out of there. I didn’t want her there at all, really, not when it’s only been three days since her head injury, but she insisted.
When the topic came up over coffee and donuts this morning—I didn’t dare make breakfast sandwiches again, but donuts from the local bakery seemed safe enough—I reassured Bea that the meeting could wait until she was feeling better.
“But it can’t wait,” she told me firmly. Fiercely, even. “Jenna’s killer is out there. What if he goes after someone else? What if another woman is killed, and something I know could have stopped it?”
It was hard to argue with that.
Because while we’ve been working hard on the investigation, there were still a lot of gaps we needed to fill, and Bea was our best chance of doing that.
So I brought her to the conference room after a breakfast she barely touched, and she spent the next two hours answering questions about her background—friends and coworkers and ex-boyfriends who might have motive to want Bea hurt or in jail. She told us about Jenna and her mysterious request to meet and how she thought it might have something to do with her boyfriend.
“I don’t know that they were having problems,” Bea explained. “It was just the only thing I could think of. But it could have been something else. A conflict with another coworker. A patient who acted inappropriately. I wish I knew. I wish I’d asked her on the phone. Or hurried to meet her sooner. Then?—”
Her voice broke at that point, so we called a quick break.
Bea could have pushed the rest until tomorrow. No one would have minded. But she wanted to be done with it. Wanted to tell us about the time spent in the locker room. About the sound of the man’s voice who hurt her. About the words he said.
By the end of the meeting, poor Bea was crying, and I felt terrible for letting her be there.
I still feel terrible.
Which is one of the reasons I made an impromptu trip to the grocery store to pick up as many of the ingredients I remember her talking about using in her recipes—hothouse tomatoes andorange bell peppers and bay leaves and sweet creamery butter and extra virgin olive oil.
