“You can’t ignore me all the way back to Camberwell,” he says.
I laugh out loud, like this—“Ha!” I can ignore him for the rest of mylife.I can makeeveryoneignore him! I can make him forget heexists.
Just because I haven’t spelled Shepard silly yet doesn’t mean it’s impossible. I just have to put my back into it. I’ll get the job done.
“Penelope . . .”
We turn a corner. I whip around and stick my finger in his face. I’ve got my gem clutched in my fist in case I decide to cast a spell. “When were you going to tell me that you were engaged to a demon?”
Shepard looks pitiful. Fortunately, I’m pitiless.
“I can explain,” he says.
“Apparently you can’t! Because I asked you to explain, multiple times, and you didn’t!”
“I was going to, Penelope!”
“Really? When!”
“When it was relevant!”
“Shepard, we were investigating your curse, which wasapparentlya marriage contract, which youapparentlyalready knew. It was relevant the whole time!”
“I was going to tell you, I swear.” His tone is very sincere. “I tried.”
“No.Close.Rhymes with ‘tried’ . . .”
“Penelope.”
“Youliedto me, Shepard!”
“I didn’t! I just hadn’t explained yet!”
“We have literally been making lists of things that we know and things that we don’t, and not once did you say,‘Here’s something I know: I have a fiancé in hell.’”
“She’s not my fiancée!”
“Wait, is it a ‘she’ or a ‘he’?”
“I really don’t know whether demons have gender.”
“But you said ‘he’ before. Is this another lie?”
“No! I mean—maybe. I just . . . I didn’t want you to think . . .”
“Think what?”
“That I’d been seduced by some she-devil!”
“Well, now I can assume that’s exactly what happened!”
“No, it wasn’t like that!”
“I don’t know what it was like, do I, Shepard? Because you didn’t tell me! Apparently you told Kipper the truth as soon as you met her, but to me? Youlied.”
“Penelope, when I first told you, I didn’t know that I was going to see you again, that we were going to be friends. ‘Cursed’ covers a lot of bases.”
“It doesn’t cover ‘engaged’!”
