Page 234 of Wild Card 13

“I say this with love, but you look like shit on toast.”

“You say everything with love. Sometimes love carries a knife.”

Naomi fell into step beside me as we headed toward the path. “Only when love has been awake since your panic text at two eighteen in the morning.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“You said, and I quote, ‘I need to talk out my Buzz issues before I rearrange my entire apartment or commit arson.’”

Dottie plunged her nose into the powder along the edge of the path and came up with snow dusting her muzzle. She looked delighted by herself.

Naomi looked down at her. “At least one of you is coping in a healthy way.”

I tried to smile. It almost worked.

We walked a few yards in silence. Snow crunched beneath our boots. My coffee was too hot to drink, so I held it close to my chest and let the steam rise toward my face. Across the park, a plow moved slowly along the road with a low metallic scrape. Somewhere near the lake, a dog barked once, bright and happy.

Naomi waited. That was one of her most dangerous qualities. She could fill any silence with warmth, jokes, gossip, or a highly specific complaint about customers who used bookstore tables as conference rooms without buying so much as a drip coffee. But when she needed to, she could wait me out with the patience of a woman who knew all my escape routes and had personally blocked them.

I made it almost to the first bend in the path. Then I said, “I went to his house last night.”

Naomi’s head turned slowly.

I kept my eyes on Dottie, who was attempting to climb a snowbank that was not tall enough to justify the amount of effort she was putting into it. “I followed him there after work.”

“Lucy.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Because when you panic-texted me in the middle of the night, I thought maybe you had run into him in the parking lot or cried in your office. What happened?” she asked quietly.

The path curved toward the lake. The snow muffled the city enough that for a moment, it felt like we were the only two people awake in Northbend. Just us, Dottie, the trees, and the frozen breath leaving my mouth in uneven clouds.

I wrapped both hands around my cup. “It was his cousin.”

Naomi stopped walking.

Dottie kept going until the leash pulled gently, then turned back with deep offense.

Naomi blinked. “What?”

“The girl at Mase’s party.” My throat tightened around the words. “The girl he took into the bedroom. Her name was Samantha. She is his cousin.”

Naomi stared at me. Then she said, very calmly, “I am going to need everyone in that family to discover nouns.”

I let out a sound that was not quite a laugh.

“Cousin,” Naomi said, lifting one hand. “Migraine. Medication. Any one of those words could have done heroic work eight years ago.”

“I know.”

“Did he lose access to language on the porch? Was there a temporary noun shortage in greater Northbend?”

“Naomi.”