Page 75 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

She huffs. “You can’t spell.”

“I was respecting the poetic meter.”

“Respect the food, please. It’s Grandma Erzsébet’s chicken paprikash stew. Improved, obviously.”

That’s Quinn-speak for, Yes, my dear friend, I would be devastated if you were killed in pursuit of our shared hobby. Please eat this food I prepared with my own hands, as it is the only way I know how to show love. I dip my spoon into the bowl, raise the first bite to my lips, and nearly slide off my stool in ecstasy. It’s the best thing I’ve eaten in days.

“This is going to cure the rest of me,” I tell her around another mouthful. “I can feel my synapses reweaving.”

She actually chuckles as she scoops up a spoonful from her bowl and nods in satisfaction. “Good batch. I adjusted the fat ratio and optimized the paprika bloom.” She extracts a little leather notebook from a pocket in her colorful skirt and starts to scrawl. “This one’s a keeper.”

Quinn once let me peek at her recipe file, and what I saw chilled me to the bone. The scratches and scrawls in her indecipherable handwriting on those yellowed, torn, grease-stained pages could pass for a mass murderer’s manifesto instead of a recipe for Dobos torte, which she’s been trying to master for fifteen years. The only sign of my otherwise hyper-organized best friend is in the back, where every attempt at the goddamn torte is numbered, dated, and logged in tiny, precise handwriting I barely recognize as hers. Each one is marked “failure.”

“My semester is fine,” she says, picking up the question I asked several minutes ago. “My dean remains a hideous human, but not hideous enough to kill.”

“Unfortunate.”

“Very,” she agrees. “My students are either brilliant, lazy, or absent, and I despair of all of them. All but two of my colleagues are hopeless dolts, and the instant I get tenure, I’m going to tell every last one of them exactly what I think and liquefy the insides of anyone who has a problem with it.”

This diatribe should be jarring coming from a short, round, freckle-faced woman wearing a 1968 Mexico City Olympics T-shirt and a floaty patchwork skirt, but it’s those contradictions that drew me to her in the first place. I’d cheerfully murder everyone in her department if she needed me to—not that she’d ever admit to needing anyone.

When my phone lights up with an incoming call from the West Side Women’s Shelter, I give Quinn the one-minute finger as I scoop it up. But the conversation’s even shorter than that, and I growl as I end the call.

“Trouble?”

“No.” I sigh. “Yes. The woman married to the guy who did this to me”—I point at my head—“left the shelter last night. No word to anyone, no contact information, nothing.”

“And?” Quinn asks.

“And,” I say patiently, “I talked to the police this morning about the incident with her husband⁠—”

“Incident,” Quinn snorts.

“—so I wanted to check on her, make sure she’s doing okay. See if she needed money to start fresh somewhere new. But Lindsay vanished.” I jam my hands in my hair, remembering too late that I put gel on it this morning. “The only good news is, Ray Overton’s been calling the shelter looking for her too, so at least she’s not with him.”

Quinn absorbs all of that in silence.

“What?” I ask defensively.

She shrugs. “For someone who doesn’t like caring about people, you sure care about a lot of people.”

“I don’t.”

“You do. It’s exhausting. Keep eating.”

I keep eating, but only after glaring at her, and only because it’s delicious.

“Speaking of, when are you going to drop the whole Dr. Mohr act for the princess next door?” Quinn asks.

The hand not holding my spoon curls into a fist on top of the island. “The princess next door sat with me all night on Friday when I needed someone.”

I don’t share the rest of it. The feel of her finger on my lips. The shape of her body when she’s curled around a mug of tea. The intimacy of her quiet, nighttime voice. Those details belong to me.

But Quinn notices what I’m not saying, just like she notices the way I force my fingers to flatten again.

“Interesting.” She turns to the sink and rinses her bowl and spoon before depositing them in the dishwasher. “Took her long enough to notice your finer qualities.”

I have no response to that, and Quinn is silent until she’s washed and dried her jar.