The puzzle with Aiden wasn’t so hard to decipher after all. It annoyed me that I hadn’t figured that one out right away.
Only seven days away.
Unfortunately, time was running out on that one.
Tessa, a vegan, used her flatbread to scoop out a dollop of hummus. Even after living with me for three years, she still hadn’t gotten used to the idea that I actually ate things that used to have faces, and I noticed her eyeing me unhappily as I took a bite of my bird-poop-free ham sandwich.
I took the opportunity to pour a glimmer of champagne into Lien-hua’s glass, and then tipped some into mine as well. Tessa held out her half-finished can of root beer. “You can top this off for me too, Dad.”
“Mm-hmm. I don’t think so.”
“You two are FBI agents. It’s not like I’m gonna get in trouble for—”
“Sorry, dear, no champagne. Not today.” Then I raised my glass. “A toast. To us. To becoming a family.”
Lien-hua lifted her glass, Tessa raised her can of soda and said, “Dum vivimus vivamus.”
Both Lien-hua and I looked at her quizzically, and when I asked for a translation she looked suddenly self-conscious that she’d said it. “Umm… ‘While we live, let us live.’”
“While we live,” Lien-hua repeated softly, “let us live. Yes. I like that. That’s my kind of toast.”
We repeated Tessa’s Latin toast and tapped glass against glass and glass against can, then drank, and in that moment, despite the grisly cases I had on my plate at the Bureau, despite all the death and gore I deal with every day, sitting there in the park with the clouds overhead and the cherry trees in full bloom nearby and the two people who mattered most to me in all the world beside me, the moment bordered on perfection in a way that so few moments in my life ever have.
While we live, let us live.
Yes, let us live.
After we’d finished eating and twilight began to descend, we packed up and headed toward the deserted road where Lien-hua and I had left our cars.
“We still on for tomorrow morning?” Lien-hua asked Tessa. “The cake tasting?”
“So you were serious?”
“Of course. I need to decide on the wedding cake and I could really use someone to help me try the samples at the bakeries I’m considering.”
Despite Tessa’s strongly held beliefs about a plant-based diet, when it came to chocolate cake she had a marked weakness and somehow managed to overlook the fact that animal by-products were used in cake batter. “Are you thinking chocolate?”
“I’m thinking chocolate.”
“We just swing by bakeries and sample cake?”
“Pretty much. Is eleven o’clock alright?”
To put it lightly, Tessa was no early riser, and eleven on a Saturday was going to be pushing it. But it sounded like this time around she was properly motivated.
“Sure. Yeah. I can deal with tasting cakes for an hour or two.”
“Let’s hope we find one we like before two hours of cake tasting or I’ll never fit into my wedding dress.”
I caught myself picturing how stunning Lien-hua was going to look in her wedding dress — even despite a bit of cake tomorrow — and tried to not let it distract me too much.
It wasn’t easy.
We arrived at my Jeep. Tessa told Lien-hua good-bye, then climbed in, and I took both of Lien-hua’s hands in mine. “So, cake tasting?”
“It’ll give us a little time together. Just us girls. Besides, there’s something I need to talk with her about.”
“And that is?”
She looked at me wryly. “You’ll find out when the time comes.”
“Secrets, hmm?”
“Possibly.”
I remembered last week when Tessa started riffing on why couples break up, and she told me girls like guys who are dangerous; guys like girls who are mysterious. “It’s simple. If you’re a guy, stop playing it safe all the time and learn to risk more than you can afford to lose. If you’re a girl, stop trying to get a guy by opening up to him. What really drives him mad is when you make him keep wondering about you. Relationships fall apart when the guy turns into a wimp or the girl has no more secrets.”
Nicely done for a teenager.
“Well,” I said to Lien-hua, “I guess a few secrets are okay.” Her deep ebony eyes drew me in and wouldn’t let me go, and finally I just whispered to her how much I’d missed her.
“I missed you too.”
We were silent for a long time, and when she finally spoke, her voice was soft and delicate and feminine in a way she was not ashamed of, a way that made my heart beat even faster. “I love you so much, Pat.”
I wanted to spend time with her tonight, just the two of us, but our schedules weren’t making that possible, and I could hardly wait until tomorrow evening, when we were planning a little alone time.
I took her in my arms. “I love you too.”
“Just think, next month it’ll be official — till death do us part.”
“Till death do us part,” I said softly, and it was not just a wish, but a promise.
Then we kissed, she left for her car just down the road, and I slid into my Jeep beside Tessa.
During the picnic I’d gotten a couple texts regarding some current cases. I hadn’t wanted to interrupt our time together earlier by responding to them, but now I took a few seconds to read them over. As I did, Tessa said, “You two were meant for each other. Really.”
“I was meant for your mom, too, Raven.” The nickname I’d given her based on her obsession with Poe, her free-spirited nature, and her sweeping black hair, just came out. She’d even gotten a raven tattoo when we were in San Diego last year.
“Yeah,” she said, “I know. I didn’t mean it in any weird way.” She let her voice trail off. “I just… I can’t believe it’s been two years already since she… I mean, since she’s been gone. Sometimes it seems like forever ago when she died and sometimes it seems like it was just yesterday. That doesn’t make any sense, but…”
“No.” I set down the phone. “It makes perfect sense.”
“I’ll always love her, Patrick. Like no one else in the world. No one else, ever.”
“I know.”
“But I’m really glad Lien-hua is here now. She’s a good influence on you. You can be a bit impetuous at times, left to yourself.”
“Impetuous?”
Her eyes widened in mock surprise. “Um — yeah. Anyway, there’s going to be three of us again. You know, a family.” Though she didn’t often open up to me like this, I knew that she’d always wanted two parents around, and the family I’d formed with her mom had ended way too prematurely.
“There’s three of us now,” I told her. “We don’t have to wait for a ceremony to feel like a family.”
Tessa looked thoughtfully out the window toward the trees, then back my way. She gave me a tiny, soft smile — something I rarely saw, and I couldn’t shake the thought that at least here, now, on this night, everything seemed right in the world.
2
He was in the backseat of her coupe.
That’s how he got to her.
He knew this park well and had been watching the picnic from behind a tree on the far side of a small rise near the edge of the forest. Considering what he was about to do, there was something tragic about the scene, about the three of them talking and smiling and raising a toast, so oblivious, so unaware of what this evening was going to bring. How it would change everything.
Their last idyllic moments together.
The small thrill he felt while watching them, the thrill that came from knowing the grief that lay in store, was an aspect of his nature he was neither proud of nor ashamed of. A sadist? Perhaps. Yes, that was the preferred term out there, but he was most definitely not the cartoonish chortling, hand-wringing kind of sadist or the panting torture-porn addict who sits in his basement surfing the Web with a towel in one hand, his mouse in the other.