“Vi?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think…” She took a small breath. “Maybe we shouldn’t go tomorrow? Like, if we were overstepping before, this is insane. It doesn’t feel right.”
“No,” I murmured. “You’re right. It’s not our place.”
“What if she’s made all this progress and getting this letter ruins it?”
“Dex knows her. I trust him.” I paused, surprised at how easily these words slipped out. I couldn’t pinpoint if it was a knee-jerk reaction or if the trust transcended his mistake. I quickly amended: “I trust him with this. If this was going to break her, we wouldn’t be here right now.”
“Yeah.” She snuggled in closer, her voice softer, slower. “Ifsomeone showed up with a letter from Dad, it would be everything.”
Yeah, I thought as the darkness closed in.It would.
“Don’t ever let me stay up for over twenty-four hours again,” I groaned into my coffee. Phoebe tittered, bringing her own cup to her lips. “This feels like the worst hangover of my life. But worse.”
“Getting old sounds terrible.”
“No, it’s great. It’s the best. As long as you don’t make any sudden movements or stay up past nine.”
She laughed, her voice giving life to the nearly empty hotel dining room. We’d slept in and took our time padding around our room getting ready for the day, only making the effort to go downstairs for sustenance after I texted Dex telling him to go ahead to Catalina’s without us. I hadn’t heard back from him, but he’d mentioned he wasn’t a big texter, so I tried not to read into it.
Maybe it was anticlimactic to make the trip to Oregon only to miss out on the end result, but now we knew exactly what this trip meant to Dex and to Catalina—Benji’s last words to the love of his life were in that letter. We’d never had a right to read them. A mistake of cataclysmic proportions. But we were here because of that mistake. We found Dex and now we’d found Catalina, and hopefully bringing her the letter would give them both a semblance of peace. We weren’t entitled to take part, so we loaded our plates at the brunch buffet to keep our minds off it.
“Remember when Dad threw his back out before his fortieth birthday?” Phoebe said around a mouthful of scrambled eggs. I nodded, propping my chin up with my hand. My headfelt like a bowling ball balancing on a golf tee. “And I spent like a week waiting on him? That’s gonna be us by September.”
“You shut your mouth.”
“I’m gonna have to get you a little bell.”
“Hilarious.”
“You’ll only have me for a few years, though. Once I go to college, we’ll have to invest in Life Alert.”
I plucked a blueberry off my plate and threw it across the table at her. She dodged it with another laugh. “I’m not elderly,” I said. “I am merely suffering from two weeks spent in a car with a dude I thought was another dude.”
“Is it terminal?” she asked gravely. I snorted. “You know, the whole mistaken identity thing is kind of on you. I figured you would’ve done a background check.”
“I told Arden I did. It was the only way to get her off my back.”
“She’s gonna kill you.”
I knew this. I’d been deliberately vague in my text update this morning and Arden had texted five times since. “I’m trying not to think about it. Or anything, really.” I stabbed a home fry with my fork and pointed it at Phoebe. “How are you doing with all of this? You still good?”
“Yeah.” She shrugged. “I might try to con him out of, like, twenty grand, but I haven’t decided yet.”
“You could probably get him to pay for college.”
“And a master’s.”
“Throw in a doctorate.”
“Culinary school when I realize my life isn’t where I want it to be.”
“He’ll personally fund your first photography exhibition when you’re thirty.”
“Twenty-five,” she amended, shooting me a sly grin. “While I’m still young.”
