Page 47 of Quarter Miles (Runaway 3)

“That brings me to this visit,” Kat said, continuing on. “Gemma hired a PI a while back to look us all up. She was curious and wanted to know where we’d all landed. I hope you don’t mind. I—we—drove the Cadillac here to find you.”

“Not Karson?”

“No.” Kat shook her head. “I’m never going back to California.”

Because of her mother? Because of the memories? Hell if I knew the answer. More than I wanted anything from Kat, her body or her friendship, I craved her trust.

“I can understand that.” Aria gulped the rest of her wine and refilled her and Kat’s glasses. “I’m not going back either.”

“Oh.” Kat’s shoulders slumped. “Damn. We were hoping that you might take the car to Karson.”

“Is he in California?”

“According to Gemma’s PI, yes.”

Aria hummed and twirled the wine in her glass. “You know, I’ve thought of doing the same, with an investigator. Except for the fact that I’m a gardener and can’t really afford that sort of thing.”

“You’re a gardener?” I asked.

Aria touched the tip of a tulip in the vase on the table. “Everything around the hotel has been grown by me or a member of my team. I cut these flowers this morning in our offsite greenhouse after I saw you in the lobby.”

“I wondered about that.” Kat smiled and looked to me. “Aria was always growing things in the junkyard. She’d buy a packet of seeds and find an old egg carton. Then we’d all get a plant or a flower for our own, usually in an empty can of green beans. I was sad to leave them behind when we left.”

Aria’s face soured. “I hate green beans. But don’t worry, I took care of your flowers. I found these industrial buckets and I made Karson help me fill them with dirt. Then I replanted everything and staged them all around the junkyard. I’ll never forget the look on Lou’s face when he came out of his shack one day to see all the green leaves and pink flowers I’d put beside his front door. It was this hilarious mix of shock and disgust and pride.”

“Poor Lou.” Kat laughed, fondness in her gaze.

Poor Lou? That man had let a bunch of kids camp out in his junkyard, living in abandoned cars and ramshackle tents. But that reverence that Katherine and Gemma had for the junkyard, for Lou, was written on Aria’s face too.

“Remember that time your cat destroyed all my seedlings?” Aria asked.

“She didn’t destroy them.” Kat rolled her eyes. “She just knocked over a couple.”

“All of them. That animal was an evil, orange beast. I still hate cats to this day.”

“Did, um . . . did Lou feed her after I left?”

Aria nodded. “And all of her kittens. When I finally left the next year, there were like twenty cats living around his shack. But no mice.”

“You had a cat?” I asked. Another thing I wished I had known.

“Just this stray that kept coming by.” Kat shrugged. “She wasn’t really mine. I fed her a few times and then she didn’t leave. We didn’t let her sleep in the tent with us, but she kind of gravitated toward me.”

“She only gravitated toward you,” Aria said. “That cat would hiss and scratch the rest of us if we tried to pet her.”

It was strange to observe Kat with someone else from her youth. For the first time, I was the outsider. Gemma and Kat didn’t talk about the junkyard. If they did, it was done at their weekly girls’ night because whenever they were around the family, conversation was focused on life and happenings on the ranch.

But Aria had no connection to the Greers. I’d learned more about Kat in the past few days than I’d learned in a decade.

The waiter arrived with our dinner and conversation halted as the three of us began eating.

“Wow.” Katherine’s eyes widened after the first bite of her steak. “This is amazing.”

I swallowed my own bite, hating to admit that it was good. I’d also cut that bite with my fork.

“Do you still paint?” Aria asked as she fluffed her baked potato.

Kat shook her head. “No, not anymore.”