Page 29
Calla: WAIT
Calla: COME BACK
Calla: TELL US MORE ABOUT THE MEET CUTE
Lila: It was NOT a meet cute
Serena: Never know.
Lila: Don’t start
Serena: You failed to mention that (based on looks alone) he’s exactly my type.
Serena: He is objectively a problem. Subjectively, I would like to make out with the problem.
Calla: *squeeeeeeee*
Lila: NO
Lila: NOT SQUEEEEE
Lila: SERENA TELL HER NOT SQUEE
Serena: Read. 6:14 PM.
Itoss my phone on the bed and smile to myself at the fact that Baryn and I technically do have at least one other thing in common aside from wanting to solve this murder: rage-baiting Lila. It bounces once against the mattress, screen still glowing faintly from the last message.
Lila is many things—brilliant, loyal to a fault, catastrophically dramatic in a way that somehow circles back to endearing—but she is also incredibly predictable when provoked. It’s almost too easy. If I mention Baryn in the wrong tone, she will absolutely spiral into a dissertation on why he is emotionally unsafe and likely to ruin my life; citing precedent, supporting evidence, and at least one anecdote I’m fairly sure she will have rehearsed in advance.
Which, to be fair, might be true.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t entertaining.
And it definitely doesn’t mean I don’t love her for caring enough to panic.
The logical, hyper-organized part of my brain—the part currently occupied with ensuring my note pages are aligned to the exact millimeter—insists I have zero interest in reaching out to Baryn.
But then there’s the other part. The tiny, persistent itch at the base of my skull that functions on a purely data-driven curiosity.
It’s not that I want to talk to him, per se. It’s that he likely possesses a cache of information regarding Casey’s disappearance that my official channels would not even begin to touch on. Even if the osteological evidence currently sitting in the lab ends up being a negative ID for Casey, the Casket Case archives are still a shiny, forbidden lure.
I find myself experiencing a compelling urge to examine his records. It is the same intellectual morbidity that drives a microbiologist to scrutinize a particularly virulent culture—disgust becomes considerably less important when there’s something useful to be learned.
However, my professional ethics (and my thoroughly ingrained self-preservation instincts) remain firmly intact. I’m not about to offer him a single crumb of my own findings. At this stage, the evidence is dangerously thin, and Baryn is exactly the kind of person who could take a preliminary observation and turn it into a viral, six-part podcast cliffhanger.
“So,” Tamsin says, before swallowing a massive bite of pepperoni pizza. “What next?”
I look at her, then back at the two pizza boxes currently colonizing my duvet, grease stains are blooming across the cardboard. Tamsin is perched cross-legged at the foot of the bed, dismantling her second slice with an efficiency I usually reserve for processing remains. She watches me pick at my own slice—a sad, lukewarm triangle of cheese—while I glare at my laptop.
My phone vibrates. I groan before I even see the caller ID. I know who it is without looking.
I swipe to answer, and her face instantly fills the screen—bright, high-definition, and entirely too close to the camera lens. I love her more than almost any other human being on this planet, but I still feel my shoulders instinctively hike toward my ears. It’s a Pavlovian response to thirty years of relentless pestering.
“Hi, Mom.”
Beside me, Tamsin mimes a silent, dramatic good luck with a mouthful of crust. Somehow, the British lilt survives complete silence.
“Serena! You look pale,” my mother skips any form of greeting in favor of an immediate, unsolicited medical assessment. “Are you eating? I’m looking at your forehead and I see stress lines. Are those new?”
