Maybe I was being silly. I considered the possibility that I was projecting my own stress and worries onto her, blowing things out of proportion. Maybe I was just being selfish, wanting her to shine all her glorious, sparkly light onto me and me alone—and not on Leon Snodgrass.
I sighed. “Fine.”
“That’s better. Now, on to more pressing things... Our Daniel is meeting you at what time?”
“He’s not ours.”
“Maybe not yet, but we can dream, yes?”
No problems there. Over the last twenty-four hours, all I could think about was how his heartbeat felt under my hand. Last night at work, I thought about it so much that it distracted me from doing my job correctly. I incorrectly programmed not one buttworoom keys. I had Joseph fetch the wrong car from the garage for a guest. I made errors when I ran the auditing program and had to get Melinda to override it so I could run it again. Chuck witnessed that fumble and christened me with a new nickname: Dopey. As in stupid Snow White and her stupid dwarfs.
“Hey,” Aunt Mona said, frowning, “this isn’t part of your mystery case, is it? Whatever it is you’re doing with Daniel tonight?”
“I don’t think so? But that reminds me... We found a clue. Hold on.” I rummaged around in my purse and pulled out the spreadsheet we found in the hotel. “Raymond Darke left it in a hotel room. We’re not sure what it is. I’ve tried matching the Cyrillic characters to an alphabet online, but it’s impossible. The font on the printout makes the script look different, and some of the letters are connected, and I can’t for the life of me make it out.”
“Is this Russian?”
“Ukrainian.”
Her brows lifted. “Really? I know someone who speaks Ukrainian. David Sharkovsky—he’s that Seattle gallery owner.”
“The guy who bought your first painting?” Which in turn led to my Nutella overdosing. I’d heard about him but had never seen him. “He’s the guy who sold yourYoung Napoleon Bonapartepainting, right?” It was quite the conversation piece, and her biggest single sale of an original painting.
“That’s him. He’s sort of an asshole, but I’ll bet he could translate this for you. If you want, I could try to arrange a meeting. Maybe you, me, and our Daniel could have lunch?”
“Are you serious?”
“I’ll give him a call and let you know tomorrow. As payment, you can promise to have a good time tonight.”
“I can’t promise that. I don’t even know what we’re doing.”
“Birdie,” she said, throwing her arms around my shoulders to hug me, “one day you’ll realize that the not knowing is the best part of life.”
Maybe for someone brave like her. Me? I wasn’t so sure.
After parting ways with Aunt Mona, I walked home with Grandpa Hugo and spent the rest of the afternoon fluctuating between anxiety and excitement. Sure, Daniel said this was a date that wasn’t a date. I shouldn’t place too much importance on one night. Or maybe at all. It felt like we’d done everything backward. If you were baking a cake and rushed to the end of the recipe, stuck it in the oven, and then several minutes later realized you forgot the eggs, wasn’t it too late to add them?
Maybe we weren’t a cake with missing eggs, but I honestly didn’t know what we were or what I wanted us to be. I tried in vain to work it out on the ferry ride into the city that night, but my mind completely emptied when I stepped outside the terminal. Because that’s where I found Daniel, sitting on the hood of his Subaru.
When he turned his head and spotted me, a giddy sense of elation zipped through my chest. He dropped to his feet with feline grace and smiled at me as if I were the sun. I smiled back from across the street, waiting for cars to pass before I crossed, heart hammering erratically. And then my feet were moving, and I was breathing, and it was all okay. I could do this.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“I worried you’d change your mind,” he said.
“But here I am.”
“I should have trusted in my own mantra. Fate finds a way.”
“Let’s not bring fate into this, Jeff Goldblum,” I teased.
He held up his hands in prayer and bowed. “That man should be canonized as a saint.”
“I’m starting to think you’ve got a bigger crush on him than Angela Lansbury.”
“Please keep my secrets, Birdie.”
