Suddenly, I suspect where he’s going. “Wait, you’re not about to say there could have been a copycat, are you? Someone who knew Ruck’s pattern and used it?”
Logan shakes his head. “No, only Sailor was dead by that point, and there was little publicity about her murder farther downstate. That’s why the cops didn’t put two and two together at first. We should know more in a few days, once Halligan has looked at everything.”
“All right.” Though nothing’s all right about it. And I hate how we sound like guests on a true crime podcast, when it’s ourdaughterwho’s dead.
“Look, Bree, why don’t we table this for now?” Logan suggests. “The letter’s for you—a copy I made—but you can stick it in a drawer and not look at it again. I’m happy to be the point person with the cops on this, and I can keep you abreast as much or as little as you like.”
“I need some time to consider it,” I say, rising from the table. “Why don’t you finish your meal, and I’ll check on the guest room.”
“Sure, thanks.”
For the next few minutes, I concentrate on nothing but mundane tasks: putting a fresh towel in the guest bathroom, turning down the bedspread, opening the window a crack to let fresh air into the room.Try not to think right now,I tell myself.Just put one foot ahead of the other.
When I return to the kitchen, Logan is at the sink, washing his plate. Another kitchen memory floods my brain: Logan and I had been dating for six months, and one weekend, with both roommates out of town, we had my apartment all to ourselves. Logan made the most perfect coq au vin for dinner on Saturday night.
“God, I could eat this seven days a week,” I exclaimed.
“Actually, that can be arranged,” he said slyly. “Why don’t you move in with me?”
His words were a shock since I’d had no clue he was that invested. It took me only a few seconds to say yes, because by then I’d realized I wanted something beyond a fling with him—and I’d begun to sense he was more than a bad boy.
Unaware of my presence, Logan sets the plate carefully into the rack. Though he’s still in good shape, I notice for the first time that his posture isn’t what it once was, that his shoulders curl a little. Is it simply from age—or because he hasn’t been able to outrun grief as well as he thought he could?
Finished, he turns and finds me in the room. “Will Sebastian mind that I stayed?” he asks.
“Not in the least.”
It’s a dig of sorts—Sebastian won’t mind because he knows there isn’t a chance in the world I’d fall back in your arms.
“I’ll need to get my bag from the car,” he says.
“I’ll go with you to open the gate.”
I grab my phone and jacket, and we walk side by side down the dirt drive. As I deal with the driveway lock, using the flashlight on my phone, I notice Logan glancing up at the sky. The late-afternoon clouds have been chased away, and there’s nothing up there now but black sky and endless sprays of bright-white stars.
“Wow,” he says. “And is that Orion?”
“Yes, but he’s upside down in this part of the world. It still throws me a little.”
I swing open the gate.
“You want a lift?” he asks.
“No, I’ll walk up behind you.”
Back inside, I show him to the guest room, explaining a few details. I realize as I speak that I’m standing an unnatural distance away from him, but I don’t have any stage directions for a moment like this one.
After we wish each other an awkward good night and Logan shuts the door behind him, I grab Schmidt’s letter from the kitchen and hide it under a stack of books in my office so Maitena won’t stumble upon it. Then I move about the house, switching off some of the lights I’d left blazing.
God, what if Sebastian had been home tonight? It would have been awkward for sure, but he would have handled things with total equanimity. Though I would have hated for him to read Schmidt’s letter and be exposed to those gruesome details.
We met two and a half years ago at a publishing event in New York, introduced by a former colleague of mine who’d known him for years. Following Mel’s death, I’d left my job as executive editor at a small publishing house and worked only freelance from then on, too distraught and shell-shocked to play the corporate game any longer, but I’d finally begun to make a stab at networking again, mainly so my career wouldn’t dry up altogether. Though I was fine financially, thanks to the divorce settlement and a decent-size trust left to me by my lateparents, I was afraid that if my work evaporated, there would be nothing left to keep me sane.
Our attraction had been close to instant, which stunned me. I was fifty then, and as far as I knew, I was going to spend the rest of my life alone. When we were still speaking a half hour after the colleague walked off, and Sebastian suggested—in that beguiling accent of his—that we grab dinner, I told myself that the only fair thing would have been to hold up a sign that read “Enter at Your Own Risk.” But some mix of loneliness, lust, and a creeping desire to return to the land of the living wouldn’t let me do it.
That dinner led to another and another, and then several long, wonderful phone conversations after he returned to BA. He seemed worldly and suave, but at the same time down-to-earth and grounded. He’d been a nerd through much of his early life, he told me, and didn’t come into his own until his twenties.
“My parents got me a cat when I was three years old, and I called herEscuela,” he said as way of explanation.
