Sitting on the couch, Allen ate his dinner while the TV played in the background. He wasn’t paying much attention to it. He’d put it on so the apartment wasn’t silent while he ate.
The presenter’s voice washed over him while he chewed, eyes on his plate, mind drifting to nothing in particular. He reached for his drink, and the words on the TV caught his attention.
“—at the Briar House Hotel—”
Allen froze with the glass halfway to his mouth. He put the glass down slowly and turned his head toward the screen. The camera cut to a building at night, blue lights flashing. A strip of police tape. People in coats drifted at the edges, eager to hear or see something.
“…where police were called in the early hours….”
Allen swallowed. The food in his mouth suddenly felt dry. On-screen, a photo appeared of a woman smiling at something off-camera, her hair pulled back, and a mic in her hand.
Allen stared at the hotel’s name in the corner of the screen.
Briar House.
His stomach churned. He knew that name because he’d seen it printed in a particular font on a cream card with a thin gold border. In Rick’s car.
The memory of seeing it came back to him. He hadn’t even been looking for it. It had just been there—on the passenger-side console, half tucked under a stack of receipts and a charging cable. He’d seen it when Rick reached over him to grab something from the glove box. Allen had clocked the card without thinking. Briar House Hotel. There had been a number and a little embossed logo in the corner.
He’d assumed it was old. A leftover from touring. Rick had been everywhere. That was the point. But now—
“No. It’s nothing. Rick has stayed in so many hotels over the years.”
He turned back to his meal, stabbed the chicken harder than necessary, and took a bite that tasted like nothing.
“—identified as Cassandra Lane, thirty-six—”
Allen’s eyes flicked to the screen again, against his will.
“Police are currently treating the death as suspicious. A post-mortem—”
Allen exhaled heavily. Rick had a hotel card. That was all. People had hotel cards. He’d probably picked it up from a lobby a year ago. It could’ve been a different Briar House. There were a million hotels with the same bland name. He forced himself to keep eating.
The presenter’s tone shifted. “Ms. Lane was a backing singer and had recently worked on multiple tours—”
Allen’s fork paused. Backing singer. He looked up again. The screen showed footage from a stage with a band he didn’t recognize. A crowd screaming. A woman at the back line, microphone up, mouth open mid-note.
Backing singer. Could she have—
No, Allen clenched his jaw. Could she have worked with Rick? Maybe. Rick had worked with dozens of people. Hundreds even. A backing singer was a backing singer. They moved between gigs and between tours, and between artists.
Allen swallowed and forced another bite down. He didn’t like how quickly he’d had that thought. He didn’t like that it had happened at all. He wasn’t the kind of guy who watched the news and tried to wedge his boyfriend into it because he was a singer.
His phone buzzed on the counter, and he jumped, hand going to his chest. On the TV, the presenter kept going.
“—friends described her as talented and kind. Police are appealing for any information—”
The camera cut to the hotel again, but this time showed it from a different angle. Allen stared at the entrance longer than he meant to. He tried to picture the card again, and he could. Far too easily. The cream stock with the gold edge. The name in the center. He’d noticed it because it hadn’t looked cheap.
Allen pushed the last of the food around his plate. He tried to tell himself it didn’t matter, and that it was a card. Rick had probably picked it up because someone had handed it to him, because it was in a bowl by the concierge, because he’d been bored waiting for a driver. There could be infinite reasons why he had that card. It had probably sat in the car for months, possibly longer, and Rick had forgotten all about it.
Rick was a little controlling, but murder? Allen snorted quietly at the idea. No, Rick wasn’t a murderer. He’d met Rick and had been in his apartment. They’d had sex. He’d seen him when he thought no one was watching, when he laughed at something stupid, when he got that flat look in his eyes because someone had interrupted them, when he’d gone quiet instead of losing his temper.
A murderer didn’t… feel like that. That was a stupid thought, too. People were complicated, and he’d seen enough newsreports to know that people who had been married for years never knew the other person in their life was a murderer. Monsters weren’t always obvious, but Allen couldn’t make the idea fit the Rick he was beginning to know.
Allen scraped his plate into the bin and ran water over it, the sound of the tap loud in the small kitchen. He kept his back to the TV, like that would somehow help change the course of his thoughts. It didn’t. He could still hear the hotel's name.
Briar House. It bounced around inside his head.
