Page 46 of Dear Debbie

She doesn’t seem eager to discuss this, but I can’t help myself. I’m desperate for any little morsel she can tell me about Cooper Mullen, even if it means giving myself away.

“It must be hard to be married for so long,” I say. “I would think that after five or ten years, a lot of the romance gets sucked out of it.”

Debbie’s eyebrows shoot up to her hairline. Uh-oh, maybe that was too far. I got greedy. But I am desperate for a tearful confession that she and Cooper don’t love each other anymore and that he hasn’t touched her in years. I don’t want everything he told me to be a lie.

“Marriage can be hard,” she says quietly.

I wait for her to elaborate, but she doesn’t. I grudgingly respect that she isn’t trashing her husband, but maybe that says it all. If she and Cooper were stupidly in love, she would say so. She’s embarrassed to admit that her marriage has fallen apart.

Cooper is the one. Every time I meet with him, I’m more sure of it. And now that I know Debbie, I understand why he’s desperate to get away from her.

I just have to handle this exactly right.

37

DEBBIE

My head is spinning as I drive back home from Harley’s apartment.

That T-shirt. That T-shirt in her bedroom. I can’t get it out of my head. The smell is still lingering in my nasal passages. Tugging at me.

I know that smell.

This changes everything.

There’s a car behind me, riding my ass. I’m going the speed limit. Actually, I’m going five miles above the speed limit on a street littered with stop signs, but that is not fast enough for the man behind me. Every time I slow to a halt at a stop sign, he instantly leans on his horn until I start moving again.

Why is everyone in such a hurry? Is he a surgeon rushing in for an emergency appendectomy, and the appendix will literally explode if he spends more than one second at each stop sign?

I am not in the mood for this.

If this were any other week, I would have pulled over and let the guy go around me. I hate being tailgated—it stresses me out.

But this time, I don’t pull over. In fact, I stay a bit on the left to make it hard for him to get around me if he did choose to illegally cross the double yellow lines. And each time I stop at a stop sign, I spend a little more time there. He leans on his horn the whole time.

Finally, after playing this game for several more minutes, I hit the brakes at yet another stop sign. I count to ten in my head while the man behind me leans on his horn.

One one thousand. Two one thousand. Three one thousand…

I only make it to seven before the man gets completely fed up with me. He swerves around me, blowing through the stop sign at a good thirty miles per hour.

A split second later, the cop car I saw lying in wait turns the corner, its lights flashing.

I go through the stop sign, and I swerve around the man, who is waiting in his car for the cop to come out and give him a ticket. I flash him my middle finger, and he pays me back the same courtesy. I just barely catch the look on the police officer’s face, who thinks that the man’s hand gesture was meant for him.

Well, that was fun.

A few minutes later, I am back in my own neighborhood. When I turn onto my block, I pass Jo Dolan’s garden. I’ve only been gone for an hour and a half, but the Japanese beetle situation has clearly worsened to a critical level. If they weren’t a swarm before, they definitely are now. Jo is standing in the middle of her yard, looking miserable. It’s safe to say that the photo shoot is off. Although perhaps some entomological publication would be interested.

As soon as I pull into my driveway, I dig my phone out of my purse. Despite a few distractions on the way home, I still can’t stop thinking about that T-shirt. Studies have shown that smells trigger greater brain activity than visual stimuli due to the direct connection of the olfactory bulb to the amygdala (which is responsible for emotions) and the hippocampus (which is responsible for memories).

Before I can stop myself, I call Cooper. He picks up quickly, which I take as a good sign.

“Hey, Debbie,” he says. “Everything okay?”

I want to ask him if he can explain that shirt to me, but I can’t seem to push the words out. Things are bad enough without forcing Cooper to lie to me.

That is, lie to me again. Because he’s already been lying to me. I knew it the second I realized he turned off the location sharing on his phone.