Page 99 of Forever Relentless

If I sounded suspicious, it was because I was.

She flushed. “Oh, my boyfriend,” she paused, “huh, that still sounds weird. Anyway, that picture Dustin showed you of us, you know the one with his di—”

“I know the one, Hadley.”

She blushed again. “I think the angle of the shot was from the back of these buildings. So I took some this morning to compare, when no one was in the street, you know.” She shrugged. “I don’t want any funny looks. And when I was done, I needed coffee. Two birds, one stone kind of thing.”

She watched me. I watched her. Was that bullshit? It sounded conveniently bullshitty.

“What do you think?” She opened her photo app and showed me. Sure enough, she had about twenty pictures of our side street from different angles, all taken within the last thirty minutes.

“Believe me now?” she asked quietly.

I didn’t hide my smirk. “I’m naturally distrustful.”

“I get it.”

I looked at her. Maybe she did.

“You know you’re in college, right?” I looked her up and down, not in a bitchy way, but she was in jeans, a sweater, and her hair was tied back in a ponytail. “It’s really early, you should be sleeping because you were out at a party the night before.”

Hadley laughed. “The funny thing is I told Dustin to sleep in his own bed last night because I wanted a long lie with no distractions, and didn’t want him waking me up when his alarm went off for practice. Then my cat woke me up at five anyway for her breakfast.”

“Time to get rid of the cat,” I muttered. I saw her reaction and plastered on a smile. “Joking. Obviously.”

We stared at each other for a moment longer.

“So that explains why I’m lurking behind a building . . .” Hadley looked at me with expectation.

I looked down at my yoga pants, the T-shirt from last night, and knew I needed to lie.

“I was running.”

“From what?”

Wow. Excellent question. Also, suspicious much? “Exercise.”

“With your hair down?”

“Yeah, I like the way the breeze runs through it.”

Hadley looked at me for half a second before she burst out laughing. “Or just say ‘mind your own business, Hadley.’”

I grinned. “Mind your own business, Hadley.”

She smiled, and I felt myself relax a little. “Show me the picture again.” I held my hand out for her phone.

She wordlessly handed me the picture of her and Dustin together over the phone, and I did my best to avert my eyes as I focused on the angle and the lighting.

“Show me this morning’s pictures.”

“Oh, you can scroll, that’s the most incriminating picture I have in there.”

“Well, it’s a doozy,” I mumbled as I studied the ones she took this morning.

I flicked between them. “You’d need to recreate the lighting properly,” I said as I peered closer. “So it’s hard to say, but I’d say from the angle you’re at, and the way the shadows are, this was taken higher than ground level.”

Hadley took the phone back and spent a minute flicking as I had.