Page 89 of ILY
“Mm.” He touches my lips again. “So pretty.”
No one has ever called me pretty. Not ever. Not once. It makes heat rise along the back of my neck. “So are you.”
He laughs and shakes his head. “Noooo. I’m a mess. A big, weird…you know?” I’ve missed part of what he said when he turned his face toward the wall, but I’m not going to ask him to repeat all the self-deprecating shit he just said about himself.
“Do you remember earlier? At the club?” I ask, pulling his chin toward me.
He blinks at me. “Mm. Robbie. Gummies…”
“A lot of booze,” I say. I’m hedging around the question I want to ask. Did he remember what I said?
He laughs. “So many drinks.” He sits halfway up with a gasp. “Too many?”
I ease him back down, grabbing his hands and kissing over his knuckles. “You needed tonight. It’s okay. I had a good time.”
His breathing evens out again, and he rolls his head back over to look at me. “Why aren’t you in bed?”
“I’m not tired yet.” I smooth hair back from his forehead again, feeling that familiar ache in my chest. The ache that tells me I’ve irrevocably fallen for this man. I swallow heavily. Am I really going to say those words again? I should wait until he’s sober. But he’s staring at me.
Leaf. Myboyfriend, who hadn’t shied away from those words when I said them earlier tonight. Who grinned and leaned into me like me saying it was a gift.
“Do you remember me telling you that I love you?”
He blinks at me. Then blinks again, his eyelids heavier this time. His mouth opens, and I hold my breath, and I wait. But his words don’t come—whatever they might have been. His chest rises and falls steadily.
He’s asleep again.
Just my fucking luck, but it’s probably better this way. Whatever this means, whatever we’re going to talk about, it needs to be when we’re both fully aware. And I’m okay with that. I have been patient all my life, and I can be patient just a bit longer.
If it’s for him.
I’m no stranger to long bouts of insomnia, and being at Leaf’s is nicer than pacing my cold apartment in Portland or Matias’s rental on the edge of town. Leaf’s not downstairs with me, but I still feel his presence in the house as I start to wander around.
I’ve never had such unrestricted access to a possible crime scene before, and it feels freeing in a way that I didn’t expect to enjoy. I’ve always been a man of rigid rules and regulations, but rebelling against protocol has given me a hunger for more.
Going into private investigating is starting to have more and more appeal as I move from room to room, unearthing boxes and opening random drawers of papers that haven’t been touched in decades.
The whole house feels like a weird mash-up of Leaf’s things and an untouched time capsule of Lynda.
There are things I can tell about her immediately. She didn’t like to throw stuff away. She was a big collector of paperwork—every single cabinet and drawer Leaf isn’t using is full of receipts and work orders. She liked to crochet, or she knew someone who did, because there are a ton of handmade doilies and afghans littered around the house.
She liked penguins and lions based on the dusty figurines I find on shelves, and it doesn’t seem like she was really into her family. She left behind some photos—a young man I’m pretty sure is her son, the cousin who inspired Leaf to go into interpreting. But very few of them are hanging up.
Most of them are in boxes.
And that’s where I find my next bit of evidence. It’s an old container that was once see-through, but age has made the plastic opaque. This one, for whatever reason, isn’t sealed. Inside are what look like old elementary school art projects—a snowman made of cotton balls, a turkey from the shape of a hand with poorly cut out feathers, a couple of Popsicle stick figures with glued-on googly eyes.
And underneath that is a plain manila folder with slightly stained edges. Something about that makes my hackles rise. I pull it from the pile, and when I flip it open, I find a collection of Polaroid photos.
The first few are of the farm—some chickens, the orchard, a spot where men were digging. I assume that was for the silo because I can see the barn in the background. And underneath that are Polaroids of people.
People that don’t look like Leaf or Lynda or her son. The first couple seem somewhat modern—maybe taken sometime in the mid-nineties. Two women and one man stand in the photos. The women look somewhere in their mid to late twenties, with radar dish bangs and very straight hair. They’re white, one of them has freckles, and they both have blue eyes. My gaze falls on the man. He has light hair in a bowl cut, which is parted on the side. He also has blue eyes and freckles.
Underneath those are more photos. Altogether, I count nine men and women, several from different decades if I’m right about the clothes. They all look happy. Normal. Smiling and unafraid.
But something tells me they were not her friends.
My heart skips around my chest as I set them all back in the folder and lay it on the table. This is better than the box of shoes. This is something I can use to look up missing persons.
