Page 44 of Your Every Wish

This is a first. I canceled on Dex.

I told him that I’m not up for the three-hour drive to his place this weekend, even though Kennedy said I could borrow her car and Dex made reservations at a trendy new restaurant in the Mission District.

And this is the funny thing. Dex wigged out about it and said he’d come to me. When has that ever happened?

Now, he’s on his way.

“Did you do something?” I stare Misty straight in the eye.

“Like what, dear?”

“Like put a spell on him. Or stick a voodoo doll with a pin or something like that. I mean, when we first talked about it, I thought you were just going to get inside his head and tell me why he was holding back. Why he couldn’t love me?

But I don’t know how I feel about you using .

. . I have no idea what to call it. Okay, for a lack of a better word, magic.

I don’t like the idea of that. I don’t like the idea of you using magic because then it’s not real.

It’s forced. It’s trickery. Contrived. How am I supposed to know if he loves me for me or if he loves me because you did some kind of hocus pocus on him? ”

“Hocus pocus? Really? That’s not the way this works. Think about it, Emma. The reason why Dex has suddenly come around is because you don’t care as much anymore. It’s that simple. ”

“Of course I care. He’s the love of my life. He’s all I ever wanted. ”

Misty’s brows shoot up. “Then why are you spending so much time with Liam, hmm?”

“Liam’s a friend. That’s all.”

“I’m not buying that—nor is Dex. The hocus pocus here is Liam. As soon as he came into the picture, Dex became more attentive, right?”

The kettle whistles on the stovetop and Misty rushes off to prepare our tea while I sit in her fluffy easy chair, waiting for answers.

Misty is wrong on the Liam front. Dex isn’t the type to be threatened by another man.

And though I’d like to believe that it’s the physical distance between us that has made him more attentive, I’m not buying that either.

“Here we are.” Misty places her silver tea server on the coffee table and pours us each a cup.

“Just be straight with me. Did you do something to make Dex more interested? Anything.”

Misty sits on the couch and takes a long sip of tea. “Nothing untoward, I promise you. But if your wish is coming true, why are you fighting it? This is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

She raises a good question because it is. Dex is everything I always wanted. And yet, while it finally feels like he’s within reach, like our relationship is exactly where I’ve always wanted it to be, something inside me is trying to sabotage it. Why?

I’m the one who is supposed to have all the answers. I’m an advice columnist, for goodness’ sake. But on advising myself, I’m coming up totally empty.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself, dear,” Misty says, a slight smile playing on her lips.

How the hell does she do that?

I walk home dreading Dex’s visit almost as much as I’m anticipating it.

I tell myself that it’s all the stress from Kennedy’s looming deadline and how we’ve hit one dead end after another trying to solve Willy’s silly riddle.

I’m torn between asking Dex for help with it and keeping it secret from him.

My sense is he’ll pooh-pooh it as nonsense anyway, which it may well be.

Honestly, I’m starting to wonder myself.

It was probably Willy’s idea of a joke, something to mess with the FBI agents who he suspected would crack the code first.

“Hey, whaddaya doin’?” Liam calls from his front porch.

I shield my eyes from the sun with my hand and look up at him. “Dex is coming for the weekend.”

“Yeah? That’s too bad. I thought you and I could grab dinner at this new restaurant that just opened near the lake. Tell Dex you’re busy.” He winks and my chest feels that familiar kick whenever I’m around him.

“Rain check?”

“You bet,” he says but I can tell he’s disappointed.

As soon as I open our front door, I’m greeted by the low hum of a blow dryer. Kennedy must be out of the shower after her morning run. I let myself into her room and unintentionally scare the crap out of her.

“Jeez, what the hell?”

“Sorry.” I put my hands up. “I wanted to give you a heads-up that Dex is on his way.”

“Thanks for the warning.” She sneers. There’s still no love lost between the two of them.

“If you want, we can stay at the Ghost Inn.” I’ve been meaning to check out the hotel, a building leftover from the Gold Rush that’s been completely refurbished and is supposedly gorgeous.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Rondi told me it’s four hundred bucks a night. I don’t want you shelling out that kind of money,” she says pointedly.

“I’m pretty sure I can get Dex to pay for it.”

Her expression says she’s doubtful. I don’t know where she gets the impression that Dex is a tightwad.

Sure, he can be cost-conscious. Aren’t all those finance people?

But he did pay off my student loans and often picks up the tab for nice dinners and expensive concert tickets.

It’s his affection that he’s been stingy with, that is until now.

“Stop,” I tell her. “You and Dex are going to have to eventually become friends. Or at least tolerate each other.”

“Why?” She twists back her smooth blond hair and fastens it with a barrette.

“Because you’re both important to me.”

She stops what’s she’s doing and turns away from the mirror and away from me. “I never thought I would say this, but you’re important to me, too,” she whispers.

“Come here.” I open my arms for her.

Kennedy hesitates for a second, then walks into my arms and we hug until she pulls away. “No more of that.” She swipes at her eyes. “Allergies.”

Her phone rings and in unison we both say, “Madge” and bust up laughing.

“Is it really her?”

Kennedy checks her caller ID and shows me the display. It’s a 702 area code. I shrug.

“It’s my boss at Caesars.”

“Well, aren’t you going to get it?”

She shakes her head and hands me the phone.

“You want me to answer your phone?”

“No, I want you to not let me answer my phone.”

“But why?” I can understand if it’s Madge, who calls incessantly, asking whether Kennedy has found the money yet.

At first, I thought it was because Madge was worried about Kennedy.

Then I came to realize it isn’t that at all.

It’s about Madge and what she wants to do with Kennedy’s money, nattering endlessly about the house, the car, the clothes, the timeshare in Hawaii she’s already picked out to buy.

Now, I’m not saying Madge is a bad person or a bad mother. Clearly, she loves her daughter and Kennedy loves Madge like crazy. But she’s selfish, self-entitled, and frankly a headache.

“Because no news is good news.” Kennedy points at her cell, which I’m now holding.

I want to say Just because you don’t answer the phone doesn’t mean there’s no news . If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it . . . Hell yes, it still makes a sound. “At least check your voicemail. It could be important. Like, what if Brock Sterling is no longer with us?”

“As in dead?” Kennedy says.

“Why do we have to put it that way? How about he’s gone away on a long trip, and no one has heard from him since?”

“Yeah, except he didn’t. He’s still in Chicago. I checked this morning.”

“How do you check that? Never mind, I don’t want to know.” Because I’m visualizing Kennedy calling him at his office from a burner phone and hanging up as soon as she hears his voice. Or worse, she’s sweet-talked someone from Caesars security to track his every move.

“Oh shit.” Kennedy is staring at her watch. “I’ve got to go. I promised the canasta ladies I’d sit in for Dorrie. She’s in Bakersfield, visiting her son.”

“Do you even know how to play canasta?”

“No. But how hard can it be?” Kennedy dashes out of the bathroom, swipes a jacket off her bed, and is out the front door before I can even say goodbye.

I spend the rest of the afternoon doing light housekeeping, so Dex doesn’t think we live like pigs. He’s fussy about neatness. I always tell him that it’s easy to be spotless and organized when you’ve got someone on the payroll who cleans up after you.

That’s how we met. I had just graduated from college and was working part-time for Twinkle Time, a housekeeping agency, while applying for journalism jobs.

Dex had just started as a junior trader at BTIG and could afford someone to clean his apartment twice a month.

Back then he had a four-flight walkup in a dicey area south of Market.

It wasn’t much but it was better than the two-bedroom flat I shared with four roommates and a labradoodle named Wolverine.

He’d purchased the “Executive Package,” which in addition to cleaning included laundry and grocery shopping. All I had was a bike, so depending on his order it could take me several trips to and from the market to fill his fridge.

But it was the laundry I hated the most. The machines were in the basement—otherwise known by my friends and me as “serial killer central”—and almost always in use.

Half the time, people stuffed in a load, then left it sitting in one of the machines for hours at a time before coming to retrieve it.

Once, I found the same dryer full of laundry from two weeks before still in the machine.

I quickly copped the attitude that if you snooze you lose, dumping any laundry left for more than an hour in a washer or dryer on the dusty folding counter.

While I’d found a way to deal with inconsiderate residents, I never got the hang of ironing.

And ironing came with the “Executive Package,” not to mention that it was top on Dex’s to-do list. To this day, he likes his creases crisp, and his collars starched and flat.