I had not said this. I had been standing here holding a cup of tea and trying to remember how to be a person, and now Trish Johnson had detonated a grenade in the middle of the school parking lot and was standing in the blast radius looking exceptionally pleased with herself.
Ben’s eyes came to me. Steady, direct, waiting.
“Yeah.” My voice worked. Barely. “If you’re free.”
“Seven work?”
Simple. Direct. He didn’t oversell it. Didn’t ask who else would be there. Didn’t turn it into something larger than the question required.
“Seven works.”
He gave a single nod. Then he turned and started walking across the lot to his vehicle.
Trish waited until he was back at his truck before she leaned in and said, at a volume that was not remotely as quiet as she thought it was, “I told you the hot dog guy wouldn’t say no.”
From the open passenger window of the truck, Donovan’s head swiveled toward us. I watched his face cycle through confusion, comprehension, and then a delight so pure it practically glowed. He looked at Ben climbing into the driver’s seat, looked back at us, and mouthed three words I couldn’t quite make out before the truck pulled away. His wave through the window was considerably more enthusiastic than the first one.
“Trish. For crying out loud. Donovanheardyou.”
“Good. Maybe it’ll get back to Ben and speed things up.”
I stood in the parking lot holding tea I hadn’t asked for but was enjoying, with a dinner I hadn’t planned, and the growing certainty that Donovan Hughes was never going to let Ben live down the phrasehot dog guyfor as long as either of them lived.
“You’re welcome,” Trish said.
I turned to her. She wore the expression of a woman who had single-handedly solved a problem the rest of the world was too polite to fix.
“I’m going to kill you.”
“You can kill me tomorrow. Tonight, you have a dinner to cook.” She was already pulling out her phone. “William’s sleeping over at our house. Don’t argue. Theo will be thrilled, Gary will let them stay up too late watching cartoons, and you will have an evening without a six-year-old asking for water every eleven minutes.”
“Trish—”
“This is happening, Kayla. Let it happen.” She tucked her phone in her pocket and picked up her tote. “Wear something nice. Nottrying-too-hardnice. More likethis-old-thing?nice. You know the difference.”
She collected Theo with one arm and headed for her car, already calling instructions over her shoulder about what William should pack for the sleepover. William looked up at me with confusion that I shared completely.
“I’m going to Theo’s house tonight?”
“Looks like it, buddy.”
His face split into a grin so wide it swallowed the confusion entirely. He jumped in the car and got situated in his seat, and I was left standing in the thinning parking lot with a warm cup of tea and a pulse I couldn’t get under control.
Chapter 19
Kayla
The house was too clean.
I’d spent the hours between the parking lot and seven o’clock in a state of productive panic that had transformed my home into something that belonged in a real estate listing. Counters wiped twice. Throw pillows arranged, rearranged, then put back where they’d started. The dishes from William’s after-school snack washed, dried, and put away instead of left in the rack the way I normally did because I was a human being and not a magazine spread.
Dinner was on the stove. Pasta with a simple red sauce. Salad. Nothing ambitious. Nothing that screamedI spent four hours on this. I’d considered and rejected three other options before settling on the thing I could cook without burning down the house while my hands were shaking.
William was at Trish’s. His overnight bag had been packed with the focus of a child who took sleepovers seriously—pajamas, toothbrush, Jolly’s red ball, which wenteverywhere with him now, and a book about police dogs that he’d checked out from the school library twice already. Trish had picked him up at five-thirty with a wink and a whispered, “Relax. You deserve this.”
Now the house was quiet, and the quiet was wrong. Not peaceful. Expectant. An empty chair and a clock I’d checked four times in the past six minutes and a simmering pot of sauce I’d stirred so many times it was practically pureed. I turned off the heat. I adjusted a dish towel that didn’t need adjusting. Moved the saltshaker two inches to the left. Moved it back.
Six fifty-eight.
