Page 112 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

I let the corners of my mouth droop. “I don’t think that’s funny at all. He and I hadn’t kept in touch since the breakup, but I hope he’s okay.”

Timms does his mustache-smoothing again, likely to show off whatever idiotic saying he has tattooed on his fingers, and props a hip against my desk like he owns it.

“Thing is, he was supposed to meet up with an ex the last night he was seen.”

“He was?” Shit, that came out high and breathy because—what the fuck do you mean, Greg told someone he was meeting me? I called him on a burner. I left no trail. But now my flustered response has Lester Timms really looking at me.

“That’s what he told a buddy.” He tilts his head and waits for my reaction like the veteran cop he is.

Every instinct has me shifting into fight-or-flight mode. I’ve never been confronted directly about any of my victims, and panic rises to choke me.

Keep it together. You led your sister through a fully engulfed house fire. You held a burning door open with your body to make sure she made it to safety before you crawled out after her. You can win a staring contest with one little prick of a man, even if you are guilty as hell of the things he’s asking about.

In the end, Timms blinks first.

“Whitfield didn’t actually name any names,” Timms says. “Just that he’d be meeting up with a girl who used to keep his dick wet.”

“Lovely.” I don’t hide my disgust at his turn of phrase. “But I’m a little more than that. We were together for two years.”

In fact, I recently learned that Greg did think of me as just a girl who used to keep his dick wet, but Timms doesn’t need to know that. So I arrange my face into a mournful expression. Just a woman who still misses that man of hers.

Timms takes one look at my sad expression and laughs.

“What’s funny?” My growl’s probably too aggressive for the worried-ex act.

“It’s just”—Timms looks me up and down and bursts into another guffaw—“I’m picturing a girl like you getting the drop on a big guy like Greg.”

He hoots and slaps his knee. I cross my arms and don’t join him.

“God, I needed that,” he says, wiping tears from his eyes before turning serious again. “If you hear anything about Danny or Greg in your investigations, you come to me first.” He leans forward, pinning me against the desk as he reaches behind me to tap his card, the smell of cigarettes and mouthwash wrapping around me.

Before he leaves, he tosses me a knowing smile.

“See ya ’round, firebird.”

He’s just disappeared from our open-plan office when Bart finally ambles over with a package of peanut butter cups in one hand and a diet soda in the other. He hands the soda to me.

“You okay, kid?”

“Nope,” I tell him.

He passes me the Reese’s too.

See ya ’round, firebird.

Panicky, impotent rage burns inside me all afternoon, from the courthouse, then back to the office, and finally into my quiet residential neighborhood.

It burns even hotter when I pull into my driveway, retrieve my mail in silence, and walk into the duplex that’s no longer my home, my fear and fury blazing so hot that I might erupt into flames and finally become the phoenix tattooed around my scars.

Timms has seen it. That means Timms watched Greg’s videos.

Too bad I can’t kill him twice.

I walk through my house to the back deck, grabbing Hugo’s red blanket as I pass by. My shoulder throbs and pulls as I suck in huge lungfuls of late-November air, the phantom pain reminding me of the night that changed my life. Changed Fi’s life.

As cathartic as it would’ve been to track down the man who set the fire, he died alongside Mom when he got too overzealous splashing kerosene on her bed and wasn’t able to escape once he lit the match.

Sometimes the universe delivers exactly what a person deserves.