• • •
AFTER SHOWERING ANDchanging, I find Grant looking pensive in the back garden.
“You’d better not be out here solving the entire mystery without me,” I say, sitting down next to him on the teak bench.
“Couldn’t if I wanted to,” he says. “I don’t think we have enough information.”
I would argue we have toomuchinformation; the events of the past twenty-four hours, let alone the past two weeks, are blending into a muddied jumble in my head.
“Could it be Wally?” I ask. “Mr. Page, I mean? Maybe his whole investigation is a bluff. Maybe he blew up the Fake House to throw Lesley off.”
“Maybe,” says Grant, tilting his head in consideration. “But I think it’d be a stretch to bankroll a serial killer competition on a police detective salary, even in fiction.”
“True.” I think about it, gazing out over the garden in its springtime glory. It’s lush and immaculate, probably the work of a very expensive landscape designer. A thought turns my stomach.
“You don’t think it’s …?” I tip my head toward the house, unwilling to finish the sentence.
“Lesley?” Grant’s eyebrows fly up. “No.No.God, I hope not. I mean, he has the money, but …”
“He’s too lovable, right?”
“Definitely,” says Grant. “There would be angry mobs coming for Anna if she made him the bad guy.”
“Right. It’s not Lesley,” I decide, feeling a hint of relief, even if it does mean we’re still scraping the barrel for answers. “Well, maybe we don’t need to figure this out right now. For all we know, there are five hundred more murder missions for us to take on.”
Grant nods. I nod back. It’s a nice thought, the four of us together indefinitely, chasing villains and stopping crimes andnever gettingtooclose to solving them. Never getting too close to goodbye.
We’re kidding ourselves.
I let out a long breath, staring out into the quiet afternoon. “There aren’t going to be any more missions,” I say.
“No,” says Grant. “I don’t think so.”
“This is the part where it gets bad,” I say. “And it’s going to get worse.”
He nods in my periphery, looking distantly over the garden.
I always knew we’d get here. But I didn’t know it would feel like this—staring down the barrel of act three, wishing more than anything that I could reset the clock. Wanting to turn away from the rising action and stay where it’s quiet—where it’s just me and Grant, telling each other secrets or arguing in the rain or walking around the city. The ordinary moments, I’ve been shocked to discover, have been among my favorites in this story.
But that’s all going to change soon. The story’s almost over, and there’s no telling if we’ll get another.
“I have to hand it to you,” Grant says. “It may not have been slow-mo, but youdidsay we’d get an explosion.”
I think back to the day I made that prediction, seemingly a lifetime ago. How little I knew. I could never have guessed that an exploding house would be the least of my concerns.
I lean into him, my head on his shoulder, his arm around me. He kisses the top of my head and settles into silence.
As time slips by, I try not to pay it any mind. Not to feel like every heartbeat is the tick of a countdown clock. I wish more than anything that this, right here, could be a scene that never ends. Anna Matthews could spend the rest of her career describing what it feels like to be here with Grant like this and never run out of things to write. The two of us could live in this handful of moments forever.
But the fact is, writers have a way of presenting their characters with the small, fragile gift of happiness only to smash it with a hammer.
Or in this case, one blood-curdling scream from the house.
Grant and I leap to our feet and chase the sound to the kitchen. First I see Lissa, hair damp from the shower, kneeling on the floor. And beside her, Lesley—sprawled flat, glassy-eyed, and gray as the ash that still cakes his hair and clothing.
CHAPTER THIRTY
My first self-defense class included a CPR and first aid module, the idea being that we would leave more prepared to save not only ourselves in a crisis but someone else, too.
