Page 115 of Dying to Meet You

“I appreciate what you shared with me.” My voice is a little unsteady, because I know I’m about to betray her confidence to a police detective.

She grabs one of my hands. “He was half in love with you. I could hear it in his voice when he talked about you. Please take care of yourself.”

“Don’t you worry about me,” I assure her. “I’ll be fine. I just wish they’d catch whoever did this, so you could get some peace.”

She gives me another sad smile. “We don’t always get what we want, do we?”

42

Natalie

“Now do it again,” her father says. “If you can get her to do it twice in a row, it’s more likely to stick.”

Natalie takes another crumb of cheese off the cutting board, and Lickie’s tail wags immediately. “Speak.”

Her tail thumps the kitchen floor, but she doesn’t bark.

“Lickie, speak!”

The dog barks exactly once.

“Good girl!” Natalie says, feeding her the cheese.

“The soup is ready,” her father says. “Can you cube the avocados? Just use a butter knife. In a grid pattern.” Her dad draws invisible lines over the avocado. “Then turn it inside out over a bowl.”

“Sure, okay.” She washes her hands first.

He cracks open the oven door to peek at the progress of the crackers he’s baking.

Cooking dinner together was his idea. He was waiting in the kitchen when she got home from her discouraging day of applying for jobs.

He didn’t ask how the day went, and this somehow makes it easier to tell him about it as she dries her hands. “The bio exam was brutal. And then Tessa didn’t likeanyof my job ideas. She only wants to apply to places that are too bougie to hire us. We filled out a bunch of applications, but I bet none of them call us back. That might actually be her plan.”

“Hmm,” he says, closing the oven door.

“She also doesn’t want to work weekends because her parents have a place on Sebago Lake.”

“Must be nice,” he says.

The front door clatters open out in the living room. Then she hears her mom’s computer bag hitting the floor.

“Mom?” She puts the butter knife down and trots over to the doorway. “We’re making dinner! It’s almost ready!”

Her mother is basically a blur, headed for the staircase. “I can’t, baby. I have a work thing.”

“What kind of a work thing?” Natalie tracks her movement as she jogs up the stairs. Why are her eyes red?

“The stupid kind.” Her mom disappears from sight.

Natalie deflates. She thought her mom might appreciate her father’s home-cooked meal. And that he’s scraping the old paint in the den in his spare time, just like she’s always intended to do. “I’ve got the time,” he’d said when Natalie asked. “It’s no trouble.”

Her mother could just thaw out alittle. Like, 10 percent.

She goes back to the kitchen and dices the avocado very carefully into a bowl, while her father pulls a baking tray of crackers out of the oven. Actually, it’s one giant cracker until he grabs a fork and gently cracks it into rectangles along lines that he’d scored in the dough before baking it.

“That’s a good trick,” she says.

He plucks one off the tray and hands it to her.