Page 109 of Life’s Too Short

“So what does my horoscope say about today?” I asked tiredly.

“It says it’s gonna be shitty.”

I laughed dryly and stared back at her with what I knew were red, grief-stricken eyes.

“What’s wrong with you?”

I rubbed my forehead. “I just found out Vanessa might have the gene that carries ALS.”

Becky looked confused. “Didn’t you know that?”

“No. I didn’t know.”

She blinked at me a second. “How? It’s, like, the cornerstone of everything she does. She talks about it like twenty-four seven.”

“I know,” I said wearily.

She studied me. “Well…does it matter to you?”

“It matters to me that she might die, yeah.”

She rolled her eyes. “No, I mean would it have changed things. Would you have not fallen all in love with her if you knew?”

I scoffed. Like I ever had any choice.

“I was done for the minute I laid eyes on her,” I said.

I meant it. And losing her was going to kill me. And if she wasn’t willing to fight, the countdown for my end had already begun.

Everything I loved was coming undone. My universe was unraveling, one strand at a time.

I couldn’t save Vanessa. I couldn’t even convince her to reconsider her options. Grace would be gone in a few months. I’d managed to fuck up my job. I’d lost control. All of it. The tornado was flinging bits and pieces of my life in every direction and the mess was getting larger by the minute, too big to clean up.

A frantic, primal self-preservation instinct clawed around inside of me. An urge to fix it, make it right. Stabilize something.

But there was only one thing I could fix. I could backpedal the damage I’d done here. At least this I could put back in order. This was in my control.

“What do you need, boss?” Becky asked like she could sense my shift in resolve.

“I need you to make a discovery request from the Minneapolis PD. I want the bodycam footage for the Bueller case.”

I sat up and clicked open my briefcase. “I need you to call everyone in here. Order takeout for dinner and get me the Keller, Bueller, and Garcia files. We’re pulling an all-nighter.”

CHAPTER 28

TAKE THIS QUIZ TO SEE IF HE’S GHOSTING YOU!

VANESSA

Adrian didn’t come home last night. Or the night before that or the night before that. I mean, he did—sort of. He crawled into bed at 2:00 a.m. Then he’d get up and leave again at 6:00. He’d reply to my texts with one word.

Sometimes he didn’t reply at all.

I’d shown up with lunch yesterday to surprise him and found him in the conference room with a dozen other people, already eating sandwiches. He’d smiled up at me almost professionally. Like I was a client.

He kissed me swiftly, promised to eat what I brought for dinner, and apologized for needing to go back to work. Then he led me out with a hand on my lower back, and I found myself in the lobby outside the elevators wondering what had just happened.

I kept telling myself it was temporary. He was slammed with a big case—he’d gotten behind the last few weeks.