Page 39 of The Night We Met

“Uh, sure?”

“Jesse’s coming too. I’ll text you the info.”

Then he gave me a peace sign and left.

I smiled after the truck.

“Damn,” Waylon said when I hung up. “Your boy’s got a hot girlfriend.”

Yes. Yes, he does.

Larissa had the kind of face that you could see for five seconds in passing and think about for the rest of the day. Unforgettably beautiful.

And she was nice too.

Also, she was hilarious. The texts between us about Woofarine cracked me up.

The last one was from this morning. He’d caught a mole at the dog park. I got a photo of a limp rodent with the words Time of Death 9:31 a.m.

Woofarine was so fast, you couldn’t stop him. You had to check his mouth to make sure he didn’t have a carcass before you let him in from the yard—and he was an escape artist too. He was so tiny he could fit through a crack in the fence. I was half convinced he had a collapsible rib cage, I had to line the yard with chicken wire.

The potty training was going great though. He was smart. Really smart. They could have used him for police work if he wasn’t so small. He was like an itty-bitty Belgian Malinois that wore sweaters and liked to snuggle.

I went back to work. An hour later, Mike came in and dropped off my lunch. Larissa didn’t come with him. I took my food to the break room and was eating when the cemetery called. Mom’s headstone was finished.

That was it.

The last thing that I would ever do for my parents was done. There was something so final about it. They were gone. I was all that was left of our family.

I would give every penny to go back in time, knowing what I know. Maybe I could have changed things. Maybe not.

But I’d have to live with it now, either way.

8

LARISSA

Mike wasn’t picking up.

It was 9:02 a.m. I was standing by my car with Woofarine in the park’s parking lot. We were supposed to be meeting Chris and Jesse for a walk. The walk was Mike’s idea, but he was already fifteen minutes late.

I’d gone to lunch with him yesterday, and everything was fine. I did food deliveries until six, babysat until ten, he texted me good night. Now nothing. Maybe he slept through his alarm?

I called again to leave a message just as Chris drove into the parking lot. “It’s me. Where are you? I’m getting worried, so call me back.”

I hung up and walked over to meet Chris as he got out of the car. Woofarine started straining against the leash the second he saw him.

“Hey, where’s Mike?” Chris said, closing his door and crouching to pet the dog.

“I don’t know. He’s not answering his phone,” I said, looking around the park. “Where’s Jesse?”

“He canceled.”

I turned back to him. “He did? Why?”

“Flat tire. He texted the group chat saying he couldn’t come. You’re taking Woofarine home after, right?” Chris said, kissing our dog’s head. “I have work tomorrow.”

“Yeah. Drop him off on Sunday?”