Page 169 of Mess With Me

But yesterday, while the nurse helped Chester with his soup, I’d grabbed Lucas by the collar and asked him what was going on in that back room. Lucas had finally relented and told me Chester’s spending all his waking hours going through Joseph’s belongings.

“It’s mostly diaries,” Lucas said. “He’s been reading each one cover to cover. Then he gets me to code them by year and put them in these special boxes.” Lucas shook his head. “For a guy who likes straw hats, he’s hella particular.”

After that conversation, I caught Chester crooking his finger at me from his chair in the living room.

“Hey,” I said, coming up beside him and crouching down.

“Wanna help me sneak outside?” he asked.

“Chester, it’s freezing out there.”

“Where’s your sense of adventure, Sasha?”

Griff was chatting with Lucas in the kitchen, and the nurse was on the phone in Chester’s room. We were all alone.

I bit my lip, then bent down and gently looped his arm around my shoulder. I guided him out the back door and sat him in his favorite of the three rocking chairs. He weighed next to nothing. Then I snuck back inside and gathered all the blankets and tucked them around him.

I sat in the seat next to him. It occurred to me later that I probably should have worried about being triggered by being in the same position as I had been that night. But I wasn’t. Chester looked out on his chickens, who were puttering around, pecking at the ground like our whole world wasn’t going to come crashing down sometime in the near future.

“You’ll take care of my girls, won’t you?” Chester asked me.

My chest tightened so hard it hurt. “Of course,” I said. “Actually, do you remember Vivian? She said her sister won’t stop talking about chickens.” Vivian tore me a new one a few days before at her place. I’d gone in to resign my position at Bijou. I thought she’d put up a stink, but to my surprise, she’d not only just said “okay,” but asked if I wanted to come over for tea. It was really nice. Except for her snapping, “I guess I’m going to have to get chickens now.”

“You must have painted a pretty picture about the chicken life that time they drove you home.”

Chester chuckles. “I was a real pain in the ass that day, wasn’t I?”

“No comment.” I smile. But I follow his gaze to his girls. “I think Vivian would be happy to give these beautiful ladies a fine home in her backyard.”

“That sounds good to me, honey,” Chester said.

* * *

I step out of the shower now, toweling off in front of the mirror. The bruising on my body from that night is completely gone, though I know it’ll take a lot longer to heal from the emotional trauma. I’m also not looking forward to the day when I have to decide whether I’ll testify against the man named Brick—and relive not just that night, but the one back in New York, with Vincent Creelman.

But none of that needs to be decided right now. Right now, I’ve got about an hour before I’m meeting Glo for coffee, and Chester after that.

I should try to seduce Griffin again. But as much as I miss him, my heart isn’t in it. And as I pull on my clothes—clothes Vivian brought me the day I got home from the hospital (they’re last season cast-offs, she told me, though one look told me they were all current)—I get the strangest tingling sensation before Griffin’s phone rings in the other room.

I hear a few words, then Griffin’s next to me, phone still in hand, gathering me to his chest.

“He’s gone, Angel,” he says.

We hold each other like that for a long time.

CHAPTER48

Griffin

Lucas dabs at his eyes. “It was a nice service.” He says it like he’s been to a lot, which, maybe he has in his line of work.

I nod, not willing myself to speak. It’s a crisp, sunny day, the first after a week of rain so cold it’d be snow in a week or two. Only the three of us—Lucas, Sasha, and I—remain next to the yawning hole in the ground at Quince Valley Memorial Gardens. Though it wasn’t a crowd to begin with. Betsey was here earlier, along with the officiant.

And one more person. I saw Sasha’s brother way out by the cluster of cedars a hundred feet away, too.

I know he’s still at the Rolling Hills, though I haven’t seen him at all. I asked Cass to have her staff keep an eye on him, but she says he rarely leaves his room.

He left it today, though. Sam never knew Chester, but he knows the man saved his life. And his baby sister’s.

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