Page 63

63

KRISTA

As promised, Amanda is home by seven.

She’s very prompt. She’s also clean and gives us rent on time, and she’s relatively quiet. She is, in many ways, the perfect tenant.

And I hate her with every fiber of my being.

Amanda is dressed in her usual blue jeans and T-shirt from the diner, and the vague scent of grilled beef still clings to her. Aside from that dark red lipstick I gave her, which she tried once and said wasn’t her style, she never wears any makeup. If she dolled herself up, she would be just as gorgeous as Stacie was, but she chooses not to do that.

Although to be fair, Stacie wasn’t very pretty at the end. I sliced up her face pretty good before ending it all. After about forty minutes, she was begging me to kill her. So really, it was an act of mercy.

Amanda is surprised to see me in the living room. “I didn’t realize you were already here.”

“Well, I’ve still got the key.”

“True.” She plops down on the sofa, letting her head fall back against the cushions. “I’m just glad it wasn’t Blake. He’s been so impossible lately. What an asshole.”

I feel a surge of irritation. Blake is not an asshole. He’s a decent guy—one of the few I’ve met. Okay, he did cheat on me, and I did try to kill him. I’m still going to kill him. But still. She doesn’t have the right to talk about him like that. She hardly knows him.

I sit down beside her on the sofa. “He’s not so bad.”

Amanda rolls her head to the side to look at me. “What are you talking about? You just broke up with him.”

“I know, but…” I’m not sure how to articulate what I want to say, and I’m not sure I want to say it to her. None of this is any of her business anyway. “So did you look at any apartments?”

She sits up straighter on the sofa. “Yeah, there are a few in our price range, and more if you don’t mind living outside Manhattan.”

“I’m okay with it,” I lie. I do not want to live outside Manhattan, but we need to kill some time until Blake gets back.

“Great!”

Amanda digs her phone out of her purse and brings up one of the rental websites. While she’s doing that, my gaze strays to the coffee table in front of us. Blake is usually anal about keeping the coffee table free of any clutter, but right now, there are a few pieces of mail strewn across it as well as some magazines and catalogs, which speaks to his state of mind when he took off. The clutter on the table hasn’t attracted Amanda’s attention, and I’m glad.

Because underneath one of those magazines is an extremely sharp knife.