Page 59 of 10 Rings I Hate About You
“You can’t just?—”
“I lit candles,” Glamma said serenely. “And set the intention for a successful yoga partnership. You can’t just leave now.”
Delaney stared at her. “That is not legally binding.”
“Spiritually it is,” Goldie said.
“I don’t?—”
“Spiritually,” Goldie repeated, slower, as though Delaney hadn’t understood the word.
“I know all about setting intentions,” Delaney grumbled and focused on me. Her expression said:If you laugh, they will never find your body.
I controlled my face completely, except for one corner of my mouth that had, apparently, decided to act independently. I pressed it back down.
Her eyes narrowed to slits.
Right. Serious. Serious event. Serious partnership. Serious?—
Gladys touched my arm. “Right this way, Doc.”
“Where are we—” I began, but she was already steering me toward the small sitting room off of the dining room.
The sitting room had been arranged for maximum psychological discomfort—two chairs angled toward one like an interrogation setup. Martha carried in a plate of buttery croissants and placed it on the side table with great ceremony. “I need the carbs.”
Gladys sat across from me, clipboard poised. Martha perched on the chair next to her.
Martha tapped her pen against her clipboard. “Above all, you must answer honestly.”
“I always answer honestly.”
Gladys’s brows lifted. “Oh,honey.” She wrote on her clipboard before I said a word.
They moved fast. Questions tumbling over each other, not giving me time to be strategic.
“What does Delaney drink when upset?”
“How does she behave when she’s overwhelmed?”
“What does she pretend doesn’t bother her?”
“What would she choose first for an event she’s planning? The hardest part or the easiest?”
“What’s her favorite color?”
I answered them. Efficiently. Factually.
Too factually.
At some point, I realized I didn’t have to think. The answers were just there, waiting. Like the fact that she always touched her necklace when she was agitated. Or that she stirred her coffee like she was trying to summon a portal when she was angry. Or that her purple aesthetic, while totally her, was not technically her favorite color.
I knew a lot of things about Delaney Hart. I had apparently been collecting them without realizing it, the way you collect receipts you never plan to need and find them all at once at the bottom of a junk drawer.
Gladys’s pen scratched out my responses.
“This is a lot of detail,” Martha said at one point, sounding gleeful.
“It’s incidental observations,” I replied.
