Page 31 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

CHAPTER TEN

Rue

Hugo’s communing with his roses when I get home from work the following Friday, and I head straight to him, bypassing my right-to-the-mailbox routine.

“Howdy, neighbor guy,” I chirp.

He straightens, clutching his rose clippers and saying to no one in particular, “She stole my line.”

“You were too slow today.” I tilt my chin at the bushes. “What are you working on? Tell me your secrets.” When he blinks at me, I quickly add, “Your gardening secrets only. The rest are yours to keep.”

“Oh. Well.” He adjusts his glasses. “It only took you five hundred and seventy days to ask.”

That stops me in my tracks. “What an incredibly precise figure, Dr. Mohr.”

He blinks, then laughs. “Estimating! As a”—he waves the clippers in a small circle, and I lean away from those wicked blades—“a joke.”

It’s not a joke, though. I’ve noticed his roses a million times, but I’ve never once stopped to ask about them. God, I’m an asshole.

But I’m an asshole who’s been in an uncommonly good mood since my encounter with Gomez last week, and it’s making me more exuberant than usual—so much so that Felicity threatened to tranq me if I didn’t stop humming the theme to The Addams Family during our kill-Navarro planning session last night.

My sunny new disposition’s spilling over onto Hugo now too.

“You really want to know about my system?” Excitement bleeds into his voice.

“Somebody ought to benefit from your knowledge.” I shrug. “And I’ve got a few minutes before I have to get changed and head out.”

“Back-to-back ladies’ nights?”

“Ah, no. Just… meeting someone.”

“Oh.” His rock-solid smile doesn’t waver. “A date, then.”

“God no.” I say it too fast, then make it worse by adding, “Just a… work thing.” Work thing, finalizing murder plans. Potato, potahto.

Hugo’s face is blank until he snaps the clippers in midair, and Dr. Bore emerges.

“So. My roses,” he says in full lecture voice. “The trick is compost in the spring and fall, and then fertilizer every five weeks through the summer.”

I lean over a bush to rub one of the velvety, blood-red petals. “Aren’t most roses done growing by now? I mean, look at mine.”

I nod toward the fading blooms on my half of the property.

“Oh gosh.” He winces. “After you moved in, I didn’t want to invade your privacy, so I kind of let them go.” He looks almost mournfully from his vibrant bushes to my punier ones. “If you’d like, I could give you a winterizing treatment. See if we can get our halves to match next year.”

I look at him before I answer, my fussy neighbor in that lumpy cardigan, his dress shirt tightly buttoned at the wrists and neck.

“I’d like that,” I say. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

“It’s no trouble at all.”

His warm eyes land on my face, and in response, I turn to sniff a lush red bloom nestled into the bush next to me.

“Do you want to know my secret weapon?” He almost whispers it, and I straighten, unwillingly drawn in by his conspiratorial tone.

“Obviously.”

He makes a show of looking left, then right, then left again. “Bone meal plus a chemical additive a friend of mine makes for me, specifically tailored to the soil, sunlight, and aeration for our property.”