“I have a job to do. And all this,” he said and pointed to the food, “it’s a distraction.”
“It’s eggs and toast,” I said. “You have to eat, right?”
I held the plate out to him and wiggled it a few inches from his nostrils in an attempt to rouse his appetite, and for the first time since we’d met, he cracked a smile. It was slight and barely noticeable to the untrained eye, but there nonetheless. It may not have been a mouthful of bright whites, but it was a start.
“I’ll eat this lady, but then you have to go back inside, okay?”
“I can live with that,” I said.
We sat across from one another and ate our food in silence. I was leery about whether I should engage him in a verbal exchange he didn’t want to have so I tried my best to act like it felt natural to sit there and remain mute. After a few minutes in complete silence, I started to crack. Taye managed to shovel gargantuan-sized spoonful’s of eggs into his mouth without the slightest glance toward his plate which fascinated me enough to endure the silence. While he chewed his eyes darted around to the street, the side yard, the bushes and then back to the street again.
A car turned up the road and steered its way in the direction of my humble abode. Taye didn’t miss a beat. He shoved his plate into my lap and stuck his hand under the side of his shirt and placed it on his waist and rested it there. The few inches of skin he exposed revealed a six pack, the likes of which I’d only seen in the movies, and I couldn’t peel my eyes away from it.
“You should go back inside,” he said. “Now.”
I arched my body over the side of my chair and stared out into the street.
“It’s just Nick,” I said.
He squinted and rose from his chair to get a better look.
“Detective Calhoun?”
I nodded.
“Wonder what he’s doing here,” he said.
“He, uh, lives here,” I said.
Taye Diggs twisted his face into a shape that reminded me of one of those apples that people let sit forever and then when they were good and rotten, they made faces out of them and sold them to the public under the false pretense that they resembled a famous celebrity.
“You and him, you’re together?” he said.
I nodded.
“Huh,” he said.
I got the impression he didn’t hold Nick in the highest regard, and I wondered why, but before I could say anything more, Nick had parked and got out of the car and walked up the drive. The two men glanced at one another and Nick made it a point to glare at the two plates in my hand, but neither smiled and no pleasantries were exchanged. Nick blew past him like he was a gnat he wanted get rid of and opened the front door and waltzed into the house like he needed to prove his status in the pecking order. I turned to follow him inside.
“Hey,” Taye said when I started through the door, “thanks for the food.”
I smiled and nodded.
When I shut the door behind me, Nick had settled in on a stool at my bar.
“I came to take you to lunch,” he said, “but I can see you’ve already eaten.”
“I got a late start today. If you would have called I wouldn’t have—”
“Yeah, well, happy birthday,” he said.
The tone in his voice reminded me of when I would go to dinner at some stranger’s house with my parents when I was a kid and my mom forced me to go up to the unknown mystery person and thank them for the invite to a house I never wanted to enter in the first place. It was every child’s worst nightmare—the strained powwow with the unknown adult.
“I take it you’re still upset,” I said.
“Still upset? I can’t believe the mess you’ve got yourself into.”
Even on my birthday he couldn’t miss the chance to tell me yet again about what a mistake he thought I’d made. This summed up our life together over the past several months. If he didn’t like something, I was sure to hear about it. He missed the reality of how it affected me, and I didn’t have the patience for it anymore.
“I need to jump in the shower,” I said. “I have a lot to do before the party tonight.”
“I’m trying to talk to you, Sloane. Don’t you care about what I have to say?”
“If you want to rehash the same topic again, I’ve said everything I want to say on the subject,” I said. “I can’t take back what happened, and even if I could, I wouldn’t. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but I can’t help that.”
I grabbed a towel out of the hall closet and walked into the bathroom.
“So what, discussion over because that’s all you have to say?” he said.
I turned away from him and closed my eyes and just took a moment to relax my accelerated heartbeat.
“Let me have this one day, Nick—okay?” I said. “Just this one.”
He shook his head.
“I’ll see you tonight,” he said, and he yanked open the front door and hurled it shut behind him. A picture that clung to the wall in my foyer of Gabby and me when we were kids plunged to the floor and glass eradicated into tiny fragments.
CHAPTER 10
Every year since Gabby died, I always visited her grave on my birthday. I usually went alone, but under the circumstances, flying solo was out of the question. Taye did his best to give me the privacy I needed and kept a comfortable but close distance. The warmth that radiated down from Park City’s summer sun filled every inch of me with peace, and being there with Gabby was one of the only places I could go where I felt that way.
“I wish you were still here Gabby,” I whispered, when I reached her headstone. “There are so many things I want to tell you about my life. I feel like I’m just going through the motions while the world spins all around me. You don’t know how much I could use your advice right now.”
Wherever Gabby was, I was sure she had a flabbergasted look on her face. I had always been the strong one of the two of us. I never leaned on anyone for anything. My life’s motto was easily summed up with the familiar words: if it has to be, it has to be me. It’s not that I wanted it that way, it was just the way it had always been.
I knelt down and placed the wildflowers in my hands in front of the marble stone, and when I stood back up, I caught a glimmer of something under a rock the size of my fist that sat on top of the center of her headstone. I must have been too swept away in the moment when I first arrived to notice it. I lifted the stone from where it rested. Beneath it was a slip of paper, and it was pink. I set the rock aside and stared at the paper like I was in some kind of trance, but before I had the chance to unfold it; Taye Diggs was at my side. He didn’t miss a beat.
“You want me to open it?” he said.
I shook my head.
“I can do it,” I said. And I reached out and unfolded it.
YOU’RE COLD, SLOANE MONROE
VERY, VERY COLD
Fifteen minutes later a half a dozen people milled around the gravesite, including Coop. The note and the rock had been preserved in plastic and passed off to the appropriate person, and I doubted I’d ever see it again. I gazed on my sister’s grave and couldn’t help but focus on all the people who swarmed around it without much care for the young woman whose remains lay beneath. It was dusted and searched for prints and evidence that would never be found.
“What I want to know is how’d this Sinnerman character know she was going to be here today?” Coop said.
Taye shrugged his shoulders.
“Who knows,” he said.
Coop turned to me with a baffled look on his face.
“Why you?” he said. “I don’t get it.”
I did. Sinnerman had grown tired of the little game he played with the person who never caught him the first time around and had moved on to who he hoped would be a more worthy adversary.