Page 39 of To the Grave

I stared at him. “What are you thinking?”

He sat back in the booth. “I don’t know yet. But we have all these pieces. If we can’t make them connect, we should at least make sure they don’t.”

“Sounds like it could be a wild goose chase,” Jace said.

“You got a better idea?” Otis asked. “Either of you?”

“I’ve got nothing,” I said. “Unless Daisy finds something on Blake’s phone or gets into his email, I think we’re at a standstill.”

Jace seemed to consider the idea. “What do you suggest?”

Otis played with his butter knife, threading it between his fingers like a magician with a coin. “Know anybody who can get us into the high school?”

Chapter 28

Daisy

Itexted Joan for her meatball recipe and made Wolf take me to the store after work. I was still pissed at them (actually, it was a lot more complicated than pissed) but I was worried about Jace. He was still huge, but he was definitely leaner than he’d been before he disappeared, and there was a haunted look in his eyes that kept me awake at night.

Since I wasn’t ready to let the Beasts back into my bed, I figured a good meal was the next best thing, so I put my hair in a ponytail and got to work. They offered to help, but after the long day at the building site, I wasn’t in the mood for small talk with the three guys who’d leveled me with the biggest lie I’d ever been told. I spent the next two hours making meatballs and cutting tomatoes and fresh herbs and slathering thick loaves of bread with a mixture of minced garlic, oregano, butter, and sea salt.

Once I’d pulled the meatballs from the oven, I simmered them in the sauce according to Joan’s instructions and a half hour later the scent of cooking meat and garlic filled the kitchen.

It had been a while since I’d cooked a big meal, and I was surprised to find it meditative. Alone in the kitchen, trying tofollow a recipe or get the timing right, there was no room for worry or fear. It was like knitting in a way, except I had to sit to knit and sometimes I didn’t feel like being still.

We sat at the table in the kitchen and talked about the punch list — all the little jobs that still had to be done — for the house. It was safer territory than the missing girls, Jace’s dad, my mom’s relationship with Mac.

And it was definitely safer than Jace’s fake death, something that still made me want to kill him for real.

“When do you want to tackle the kitchen?” Wolf asked. “I got the oven installed in the third-floor kitchen over the weekend. We can use it while this one’s being done.”

“I don’t know,” I said. The kitchen was our main communal space, the place where we had coffee in the morning and gathered at night when we couldn’t sleep. I didn’t like the idea of it being unusable.

And there was something else, something I’d barely started to articulate for myself: once the kitchen was done, the house was done.

And once the house was done, the Beasts had no real reason to stay.

What then? Would we go our separate ways like everything that had happened between us hadn’t happened? We’d said the L word — well, Wolf, Otis, and I had said it — but committing to someone was a whole other thing from loving someone.

Did I even want to commit to the Beasts? Okay, that was a dumb question. OfcourseI wanted to commit to them. In spite of everything and because of it, I couldn’t imagine not having them in my life.

But that didn’t mean they wanted to stay.

After everything that had happened, maybe they’d want to put Blackwell Falls in the rearview once and for all. It wasn’t like I could blame them.

“You okay, doll?”

I blinked and looked at Otis. I’d been spaced out, thinking about the Beasts and our questionable future even though I was still mad at them for keeping me in the dark about Jace.

“Just thinking about the kitchen.” It was less humiliating to lie than to admit I was worried they would leave when the house was done and we figured out who was responsible for the missing girls.

“It’s your call,” Wolf said. “But we might as well get it over with. The cabinets and appliances are in the ballroom. They came in last month.”

Last month.

Last month when I’d been swimming through a morass of grief. Last month when I thought I’d never see Jace again.

I felt a familiar swell of euphoria. It happened every now and then when I remembered that Jace wasn’t really dead, like my chest was filling up with helium, my head buzzing with happiness even before I could identify the cause.

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