Page 42 of Cherry Picking

CHAPTER 12

EVIE

Hazel gets a promotion on a Tuesday. By Friday, she’s thrown herself a party. Of course she has.

There’s a bartender shaking cocktails in the kitchen, candles on every surface, little folded cards in front of each dish explaining what it is. I’m standing beside a bowl labeled whipped feta, hot honey, thyme, wearing a Sex Pistols T-shirt, feeling like a smudge on an otherwise clean photo.

Tomás aside, I’ve barely spent time this month with anyone under fifty. My world has shrunk to funeral homes, grocery runs, PT appointments, and Murphy’s living room. I’d forgotten what a room full of laughing twenty-somethings even sounds like.

“You made it.” Hazel materializes with two glasses of something fruity and presses one into my hand. She’s in a lavender slip dress, hair pinned up neatly. “I was worried you’d bail for a last-minute work thing.”

“It’s Friday night, baby. The dead can wait.” I clink my glass to hers. “Congratulations, Counselor. Or is it partner now? Do I have to bow?”

“A small curtsy wouldn’t kill you.” She surveys her own party, openly pleased with it. “Junior partner. There’s a whole tier system—it’s very boring, but my name goes on something now. A letterhead. A door, eventually.”

“Your name on a door.” I shake my head. “You’ve wanted that since we were seventeen and you made me proofread that obnoxious personal statement.”

“That was a good essay!”

“You compared the legal system to a Fleetwood Mac song.”

“And I got in.”

I’m still laughing when she drifts off to accept congratulations from someone in a tailored blazer, already on to the next.

That’s Hazel. She decided as a teenager exactly what she wanted and walked at it in a straight line for eight years. I’ve never once been jealous of her for it. I’ve just never understood how a person gets that certain about anything.

I take a slow lap around the apartment, accepting tiny foods off passing trays and pretending to know the difference between expensive whiskey and the regular kind. Thirty minutes in, a tall guy finds me over by the whipped feta.

He’s blond, wearing a pale linen shirt and expensive leather shoes.

“Can I save you from pretending to read the ingredient cards?”

“I was actually invested,” I reply. “Riveting stuff. Did you know this one has three kinds of thyme in it?”

He wrinkles his nose. “That’s two kinds too many.”

“Finally, a man of conviction.”

He settles in to me and offers a hand. Grant, apparently—a litigator who works at Hazel’s firm. He’s easy enough to talk to, and he actually looks me in the eyes while I speak.

“So, what do you do?”

“Well, the dream was the arts.” I scoop a generous helping of whipped feta onto a cracker. “Now I mostly just bury people.”

His eyebrows climb toward his hairline. “Literally?”

“Yeah. I handle death care at my father’s funeral home.”

“Huh. So you’re the person to talk to if one needs to hide a body, then.”

I mime a sharp gasp. “I’d never admit to a crime in front of a lawyer.”

He snorts, and I feel myself relax another notch.

He’s funny. He’s charming. It’s a genuinely pleasant evening, which is why the sudden urge to check my phone beneath the counter—just as he takes a bite of his cracker—is so frustratingly persistent.

The screen is empty. It’s nine o’clock in Vegas, midnight in Charlotte, and with a game on the calendar for tomorrow, Briggs is likely already powered down. I shove the phone back into my pocket.