“Fine,” he gasps as Harris swaps his cuffs for police-issue ones. “I did it. But it wasn’t my fault! I was ordered to! I’ll tell you any—”
“Do. Not. Say. Another. Word.” Wally’s voice carries the imminent threat of a rumbling volcano. He turns his piercing gaze back to me and Grant. “Especially in front of these idiots.”
He continues pinning us with his stare until a yodeling Raj and a sniveling Howard are escorted from the room, then gruffly orders us to go.
Grant books it toward the hall, and I follow a bit more reluctantly. I’m glad Raj is okay. I’m glad Howard’s out of commission. But still, this isn’t how this was supposed to go.
And now we’re out of time and it’s next stop, Anna Matthews. Soon this will all be a thing of the fictional past. I’ll be back to temping and living for the breaks between jobs. Grant will be back to his beloved coworkers and his cat.
Sounds like a better deal for him.
“Hey,” Wally calls before we turn the corner, and we meet his sinister glare. “Tell Lesley.No. More.”
On our way out of the house, Grant stops by the back window, studying the discarded gnome and the shattered glass on the floor.
“This is the window you broke in?”
I toe a jagged shard out of the way. “Yep.”
“Right next to the unlocked door?”
I look up. Sure enough, the door has only a single dead bolt, and it isn’t latched.
“Oops.”
He looks at me, mystified, then walks away shaking his head, and I swear he lets out the quietest half laugh.
The EMTs out front have transferred Raj to a stretcher and are preparing to load him into the ambulance. For all I know, he has no memory of meeting us five minutes ago, but I wave goodbye anyway.
He waves back. “Thank you, Shrek,” he calls.
Grant walks over to him and the medic, wishes Raj well with a careful hand on his shoulder, and comes back to me peeling open a Band-Aid.
“Here,” he says, gently pressing it over the cut on my temple. “Now you can look in a mirror without getting sick.”
My stomach does a strange little flip-flop anyway.
On the way to Anna’s event, I can’t stop wondering what exactly will happen if we manage to get through to her. Will my head be healed? Will the bandage mysteriously disappear? Will I eventually forget the feeling of Grant’s fingers smoothing it over my skin?
Somehow, I don’t think I could.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
If the chalkboard sign in front of The Lost Plot weren’t advertisingAN EVENING WITH ANNA MATTHEWS, I’d say the place fell straight out of Anna’s brain. With its mint-green facade draped in wisteria vines and the rosy glow emanating from latticed windows, it’s exactly the kind of place where an Anna Matthews heroine would work.
Or at least anoldAnna Matthews heroine. The winsome, plucky kind who spends her time running a small business and trying not to flirt with the sexy baker next door. Not the kind who falls into murder conspiracies the way the others fall in love.
We wait in tense silence at the end of the check-in line. Grant can’t seem to decide how to stand. Arms crossed. Hands in pockets. Arms crossed again.
It’s a surreal moment, which is ironic given that it’s the first nonfiction thing that has happened to us in over a week. Somewhere in the cozy shop before us, there’s a woman who can restore our regular lives with just a few clicks of a keyboard, the dragging of a Word document to a virtual trash can.
Canandwillare two different things, of course. But if our cease-and-desist plea works, that will be the end. No more Lesley, no more Lissa, no reason for Grant and I to keep in touch. Eventually, we’ll go back to being strangers.
“You think we’ll ever cross paths again?”
I’m startled to hear Grant speak, and even more startled by the sense that he’s been sharing my thoughts. He doesn’t look at me, just stares toward the check-in table as we inch closer.
Theyesthat I want to say catches in my throat. “I don’t know” comes out instead, thin and flimsy.
