“Oh, hell, Angie,” she said. “He shouldn’t be dead.”
“He’d be pissed if he knew you’d been crying,” I said, blinking away the last of my own tears.
“Fuck that.”
I almost laughed. Katrina Laron had a talent for cutting straight through the bullshit.
I’m not sure which one of us leaned in first, but we caught each other in a bone-crushing hug. With a sniffle, I finally pulled away. Perverse, maybe, but just knowing that someone else was acknowledging the utter horror of the situation made me feel infinitesimally better.
“Every time I turn a corner, I feel like I’m going to see him,” I said. “I almost wish I’d stayed in my old place.”
I’d moved in four months ago when Uncle Jahn’s aneurysm was discovered. I’d taken time off from work—easy when you work for your uncle. For two weeks I’d played nurse after he came home from the hospital, and when he’d been given the all-clear by the doctors—yeah, like that was a good call—I’d accepted his invitation to move in permanently. Why not? The tiny apartment I’d shared with my lifelong friend, Flynn, wasn’t exactly the lap of luxury. And although I loved Flynn, he wasn’t the easiest person to cohabitate with. He knew me too well, and it always made me uneasy when people saw what I wanted to keep hidden.
Now, though, I craved both the cocoonlike comfort of my tiny room and Flynn’s steady presence. As much as I loved the condo, without my uncle it was cold and hollow, and just being in it made me feel brittle. As if at any moment I would shatter into a million pieces.
Kat’s eyes were warm and understanding. “I know. But he loved having you here. God knows why,” she added with a quirky grin. “You’re nothing but trouble.”
I rolled my eyes. At twenty-seven, Katrina Laron was only four years older than me, but that didn’t stop her from pulling the older-and-wiser card whenever she got the chance. The fact that we’d become friends under decidedly dodgy circumstances probably played a role, too.
She’d been working at one of the coffee shops in Evanston where I used to mainline caffeine during my first year at Northwestern. We’d chatted a couple of times in an “extra cream, please, it’s been a bitch of a day” kind of way, but we were hardly on a first-name basis.
All that changed when we bumped into each other on a day when extra cream wasn’t going to cut it for me—not by a long shot. It was in the Michigan Avenue Neiman Marcus and I’d been surfing on adrenaline, using it to soothe the rough edges of a particularly crappy day. Specifically, I’d just succumbed to my personal demons and surreptitiously dropped a pair of fifteen-dollar clearance earrings into my purse. But, apparently, not as surreptitiously as I’d thought.
“Well, aren’t you the stumbling amateur?” she’d whispered as she steered me toward women’s shoes. “With a shit technique like that, it’s a wonder you haven’t been arrested yet.”
“Arrested!” I squeaked, as if that word would carry all the way to Washington and to my father’s all-hearing ears. The fear of getting caught might be part of the excitement, but actually getting caught wasn’t a good thing at all. “No, I didn’t—I mean—”
She cut off my protests with a casual flip of her hand. “All I’m saying is, be smart. If you’re going to take a risk, at least make it worth the trouble. Those earrings? Really not the bomb.”
“It’s not about the earrings,” I’d snapped, then immediately cringed. The words had been a knee-jerk response, but they were also true. It wasn’t about the earrings. It was about my dad, and the grad school lectures and the career-planning talks, and the never-spoken certainty that no matter what I did, my sister would have done it better.