I shook my head and touched the table until my fingers came into contact with my glass. “I’ve got it.”
I heard her slide the plate of cookies toward me. “Don’t forget the cookies.”
“Thanks.” I took one and bit into it, my mouth watering as the chocolate cookie — not too sweet — mingled with the slightly bitter chunks of chocolate and crunchy toasted walnuts. “Beck really is the best baker in the area. Except for Bram’s girlfriend, Maeve.”
I had a standing order with the Golden Crumb for the shop and used to take a couple pieces off the top of the weekly delivery for myself.
We sat in companionable silence for a few minutes before Daisy spoke again, her voice halting.
“What happened, Cass… that day on the mountain?”
21
CASSIE
I told her everything:how I’d left early for her place, how I’d missed my parents and decided to drive up the mountain.
The black SUV.
The guardrail.
I could almost tell it without breaking into a sweat.
“Jesus,” Daisy said when I was done. “You must have been so scared. Why would someone do that to you?”
“That’s part of why I asked you to lunch actually.”
I imagined her pretty face scrunching in surprise, her violet eyes curious.
“What do you mean?”
“You know how my parents were driven off the road by that guy, Travis Dorsey?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it turns out, someone paid him to do it.”
Daisy’s glass hit the table hard enough to make me jump. “Someonepaidhim? Who?”
“I don’t know. The Hawks… um, Hawk, Jagger, and Vigo kind of beat it out of him, but all he could tell them was that the guy who’d paid him off was Russian.”
“Wow,” Daisy said. “That’s huge. Did you call that loser detective?”
Daisy knew all about my many attempts to get Detective Grabowski to invest more time in my parents’ case.
“Not yet. I don’t want to bring anything to him until I have something solid.”
“But aren’t the police investigating what happened to you?” Daisy asked. “Someone ran you off the road!”
“I didn’t remember that until recently. They thought maybe I’d gotten distracted on my way up the mountain.”
Daisy frowned. “What a bunch of assholes.”
“I can’t really blame them. I couldn’t remember anything and all they had to go on was a broken guardrail. Distraction is probably a more common reason for accidents than attempted murder.”
Now that I’d put words to it, I felt the weight of it in my chest.
Someone had tried to kill me.
