“What?”
“Independence Day is tomorrow. This is your observed day off for the federal holiday. You’re not even supposed to be here.”
“A lot of other people are here.”
“Because they’re either on the Monday rotation or they’re as bad at the work-life separation as you three.”
Ouch. Also a little hypocritical, given . . . well, everything.
Vic shakes his head. He’s wearing a tie Priya, Inara, and Victoria-Bliss gave him last year for his birthday, stained-glass butterflies against a black background, and it is just as creepy as it sounds, but he wears it anyway because they gave it to him. “Go home. Do not take any paperwork with you. Relax. Do laundry. Catch a game.”
We continue to blink at him.
“You do have fairly regular days off,” he reminds us with a sigh. “You know how to survive them.”
Sterling tilts her head to one side.
“No,” he says sternly. “No sleepovers, no pub crawls. You each go to your own home, and you don’t come to mine, because Jenny and I have the house to ourselves in what must be the first time in thirty years.”
“Where’s Marlene going to be?”
“My sister picked her up yesterday, and they’re spending the weekend at the beach with the kids for the Fourth.”
That’s actually a little hard to imagine. Marlene is so active and healthy, but she always wears slacks and sweater sets with a single strand of pearls and her hair perfectly done. It just doesn’t seem to fit with the beach.
“Now, all three of you, go home.”
“We still haven’t figured out lunch,” Sterling notes as Vic walks away.
His voice floats back over his shoulder. “That’s because you’re all going home separately.”
It’s a weirdly normal afternoon. I go home and change out of my suit, clean the fridge of anything that’s spoiled in the week and a half since I was last home to do it, hit the grocery store, pick up a box of cute cupcakes for Jason as thanks for the yard work because he loves the damn things but can’t bring himself to order them on his own, and still have more day ahead of me than I’m used to. So I do laundry, and dust, and clean the bathroom, and when I put the second load of laundry in, I seriously consider following Sterling’s example of sorting through my closet to pull things that don’t fit or that I don’t wear anymore.
I end up on the couch with a beer and a book of logic puzzles instead. I mostly enjoy shopping for clothes, but I loathe purposefully looking for things that don’t fit.
It’s evening, though still light outside, when my stomach reminds me that I never bothered to eat lunch. I head to the kitchen to poke around my groceries. I got eight million kinds of fresh vegetables because even I know our eating habits are atrocious (one of the many reasons Marlene and Jenny are so eager to feed us, I think), and cooking them up with teriyaki and chicken sounds downright delightful. Squash, zucchini, mushrooms, onion, broccoli, three colors of pepper, throw it all together with a little bit of oil, sesame, salt, and pepper on the small hibachi grill Eddison teased me for installing in the counter.
He teases still, but he will also eat anything and everything we make on it, so I think I win.
The chicken is more or less cubed and soaking in a bowl of marinade, and I’m just about through chopping the veggies, when there’s a knock on the door. Before I fully register the sound, the knife spins in my hand to a position better suited for fights than food. It’s an uncomfortable reflex to have in my own home. One by one, I force my fingers to open so I can put the knife down on the board. “One second,” I call, reaching for the sink.
It’s full daylight still; no one is going to drop off anything nefarious in broad daylight.
Drying my hands on the sides of my jeans, I head to the door and peer through the peephole, which is mostly obscured by vibrant red curls. “Siobhan?” I quickly unlock the door and open it. “You have keys.”
She gives me a hesitant smile. “You throw the chain when you’re home. And I wasn’t sure . . .”
“Come in.”
She looks uncertain in my home, in a way she hasn’t done in a while. Not since the rocky bit last year, after I didn’t want to move in together. “You’re in the middle of something.”
“Just making dinner. Have you eaten? I was planning on leftovers for the weekend, so I’m making a ton.” I head back to the kitchen and the cutting board, letting her decide how comfortable she wants to get. She looks around like maybe it’s changed since she was last inside (it hasn’t) or maybe like she’s looking for some visible sign that I’ve changed (I haven’t).
The mothers told me a while ago that I needed to stop pretending. I’m starting to regret that I didn’t listen to them sooner.
“The peppers are big, so you’ll be able to pick them out,” I tell her, ignoring the fact that she didn’t actually answer me.
“Thanks.” She puts her purse on the spindly table by the door and dithers a minute or two before perching on a padded stool on the other side of the counter. “No new children at your door?”
“Pretty sure Heather would have been wiggling with excitement at your desk if there had been.”
“Probably, but you would have told me, right?”
“No. I told you first contact would be yours.” I check the temperature of the grill and throw everything on, savoring the hiss and billow of rising steam.
“And you wouldn’t break that to tell me that another child had been delivered to you.”
“Well, the deliveries don’t require signature confirmation, you see.”
She sighs and folds her arms on the counter, a safe distance from the grill and anything that might spit out. “Are there any leads?”
“No.”
“So they could just keep showing up.”
“Yes.”
“Mercedes.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.” I shrug, poking at the veggies with the metal spatula. “There aren’t any leads, they could keep showing up, what else do you want me to say?”
“Can’t they, I don’t know, stake out your house or something?”
“It has to cross a threshold before the department can justify the expense.”
“Since when has Vic been unwilling—”
“It’s not an FBI case,” I remind her.
“The police, then.”
“The street is too quiet and open for a discreet stakeout, and they can’t afford to take officers away from normal tasks for something with no routine or predictability.”
“There’s such a thing as simple answers, you know.”
“You literally just scolded me for giving simple answers.”
She drops her chin to her arms and doesn’t respond.
I add some seasoning to the chicken and veggies, then open the fridge. “Something to drink?”
“Wine?”
“Sure.” I pour us each a glass and go back to poking. I add the sauce to the veggies at almost the last minute, giving them enough time to cook through without getting soggy, and serve it up in equal parts between two plates and three plastic containers. Handing her a fork, I pull out one of my sets of chopsticks, the nice lacquered ones that Inara and Victoria-Bliss gave me for Christmas, and put them with my plate to one side so I can clean the grill while it’s still hot.
We eat in silence, me leaning against the kitchen side of the counter, her seated opposite, and it might just be the loneliest meal of my adult life. When we’re done, I rinse the plates and fork and put them in the dishwasher, then handwash the chopsticks and leave them on a small towel to dry. For some reason that makes me think of Sterling’s coordinated kitchen, even though my dish towels are thin and ratty and pulled at random from the dollar bin at Target.
“I miss you,” Siobhan whispers to my back.
“Is that why you’re here?”