Page 21 of The Meet Queue-t

“Where’s your boyfriend?”

Good, a nice straightforward question that requires absolutely no backstory whatsoever. I toy with the idea of lying—“he’s got work to do”—but there’s something about her sharp gaze that tells me she’d see through me, anyway. Plus, I’m a terrible liar, which is why Oliver pretending to be my boyfriend helped me out so much, because there’s no way I could have pulled that off on my own.

Now he’s gone.

“So.” I take a deep, shuddering breath. “He’s not . . . my boyfriend.”

Those eyes—hazel—narrow, but she nods. “Sounds like you need a drink.”

“I think I need an entire bottle.”

“Tea will have to do you, love. It’s not even eight in the morning.”

A fair and valid point for anyone who hasn’t been up all night. Still, I guess, at a push, tea will do. “Fine. Do you know a good place?”

“As a matterof fact, I do.”

The place she has in mind is a small but stylish café off the main road. After telling her nephew to entertain himself for a change, she leads me straight there. It’s a bohemian kind of place with wooden lattice walls and pot plants overflowing with flowers and greenery.

“Now,” she says once she’s seated opposite me with a steaming mug of tea in her hands. I opted for caffeine-free chamomile in the hopes it would calm me, but so far, it hasn’t worked. I’m so hyped up, I’m about ready to jitter to Mars. Or maybe right into the Thames, just like Oliver threatened. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

There’s no point in concealing anything, so I fill her in on the basics, which takes a surprising amount of time. By the time I’m done, my tea has almost gone cold. I run my finger down the side of the mug, tapping it with my nail as I chew the inside of my cheeks.

“I told him I didn’t want to be involved after we saw the Queen, and I guess he took it to heart,” I finish.

“And you’ve changed your mind?”

“Um. No.”

“No?” She raises her eyebrow. “So you don’t want to be with him.”

“I don’t even know he means it like that,” I say, feeling like I need to defend myself. Feelingseenin the very worst—and best—of ways. “Maybe he just meant as friends.”

“And I’m a giraffe,” she snaps back. “It was as plain as the nose on my face that he was interested in you.”

The nose on her face is particularly . . . prominent. “Yes, but—”

“Don’t give me any of that.” Her eyes are shrewd as they rest on me, green spearing through the brown of her iris like darts. “You came here because you know there’s something lacking in your life.”

“No, that’s not it. I came here because my mum—”

“Because you think a dead woman is going to care whether you see the Queen’s body?” That stick smacks against the ground again. Several queueing people glance around. “Your mother, admirable woman though she may have been, will have wanted you tolive.”

“I am living.”

“You’re taking the easy way out. You’re not sure what you want to do, so you’re living through someone else’s eyes because that takes the pressure of deciding away from you.”

Wow. Ouch. That was a hefty bomb to chuck at my chest this early in the morning. Late in the night? Whatever. “I don’t know what I want.”

“What you want, girly, is that boy you just said goodbye to.”

“I didn’t say goodbye.” My nose tingles and I sniff, pushing the feeling away. “He didn’t give me a chance to say goodbye.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“Go home?” I offer, and the stick clacks alarmingly close to my foot.

“No.Try again.”

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