Page 127 of Best Served Cold

“This is my?—”

“I swear to God, Sophie,” he says with a flash of anger. “Don’t say it was your fault, and don’t you dare apologize. It was mybrother. I’ll have to figure out something else for Emil. Iwillfigure it out.”

My heart breaks for him all over again. He’s not going to give up. He’s going to do everything he can for that boy—because when he needed someone to step up for him when he was younger, no one did. “Rob…”

My mind is spinning, my soul reeling. I know Rob is going to do everything in his power to make sure these wrongs are righted, but it’s hard to let go of the thought that this wouldn’t be a problem in the first place if not for me. Emil would probably be practicing guitar in his room even now.

Rob wraps his hand around my chin, tipping my head up. “This is no time to stop thinking Pollyanna thoughts. Let’s settle it this way. I’ll toss my unlucky penny, and if it’s heads up, we invite Dottie inside, and we tell her and Otis everything. If it’s tails?” He shrugs. “We do things your way. We’ll let the little fucker keep us apart, even if it’s not going to fix anything.”

“Uh, are you willing to take a fifty-fifty chance on that, dude?” Otis says, scratching his head. “That’s a bet you don’t want to lose.”

“You’re right,” Rob says, his eyes on me. “But I’m not going to lose. I’m going to believe the glass is half full. Are you going to believe with me, Sophie?”

The look of hope in his eyes makes me want to knit my broken heart back together.

“I want to,” I sniffle. I watch in horror and excitement as he pulls the unlucky penny out of his wallet. “I want to.”

The last time I say it, it’s a whisper. A prayer.

“I do too,” he says.

“So do I,” Otis adds. And somehow it feels exactly right that he’s a part of this moment, just like he was that first day when Rob came over for a phone that was stowed in the freezer.

I suck in my breath and hold it as Rob flips the penny into the air. Then a snow-white bird swoops into the penny, knocking the coin out of sight.

The breath gusts out of me in disbelief.

“No fucking way,” Otis says as the bird lands and pads across the front porch.

Otis reaches into his pocket and pulls out a handful of sunflower seeds, meaning my cousin has either been walking around with snacks loose in his pockets, or he is very committed to finding this pigeon.

The bird hops directly to him, and I watch in disbelief as he gently strokes her feathers and then picks her up, his eyes aglow.

“It’s her. I did it. I really did it,” my cousin says.

I turn to Rob, my whole heart reaching for him. “We need to find that penny.”

“It’s gone,” he says, getting up as Otis retreats into the house with the bird.

Dottie exits her house with a huge square container, humming absently into the night air as if my universe hadn’t just been torn apart and possibly pieced back together.

She pauses on the sidewalk halfway to our house and stoops to pick something up. My heart lodges in my throat. Could it be…?

When she reaches us, she lifts it up with a grin, the copper shining in the dim porch light. “Find a penny, pick it up.”

My heart seizes. Everything inside of me is frozen. “Dottie, was it heads up when you picked it up?”

“Facing up, dear,” she tells me with a beatific smile. “Always facing up.”

I’m not sure what to make of that. A coin is always, technically, facing up, no matter how it lands. The knowing smile on Dottie’s face suggests that’s as much as she’s going totell me. And I get it. She wants me to decide which side was turned up, heads or tails.

I take a deep breath, and then I turn toward Rob and take his hand. The love in his eyes makes my decision.

“It was heads up.”

And then I kiss him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

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