“It might be a little misleading to say met,” Mr. Wojcik adds, heading straight past the hostess and into the dining room. Soft music pipes overhead, easy to hear over the distinct lack of voices and clattering silverware. I’ve only ever been here for dinner; it’s not nearly as crowded during lunch. “This is someone I’ve been interested in for a while, and to be honest, one of the reasons I made the move back to Carlton was because I hoped things might work out with her. And, well, I’m lucky that they did.”
“There it is,” Mateo mutters under his breath. I squeeze his hand, feeling a stab of disappointment on his behalf. He’s always maintained that his father didn’t come back just to help their family, and I’ve always told him to be less cynical. I wish he hadn’t been proved right.
Mr. Wojcik is still talking, winding his way through empty, white-clothed tables. “I would have brought the two of you together sooner, but things have been kind of complicated. To be honest, they’re still complicated, but this person is very special to me, and so…ah.” His voice softens. “There she is.”
I follow his gaze and stop in my tracks, my stomach dropping through the floor. I blink multiple times in quick succession, hoping desperately that she’s a mirage who’ll go away. She doesn’t; and even worse, once she realizes we’re rooted in place, she gets up from her table and starts walking toward us.
“No fucking way,” Mateo growls, his arm curling protectively around me. “Have you lost your mind?”
Mr. Wojcik steps in front of us, tugging so hard on his cap that he’s liable to tear it in two. “Look, if you could just keep an open mind—”
And then she’s beside him, her blond hair gleaming as she smiles sweetly at Mateo. “Mateo, please come sit. I can’t tell you how excited I am to get to know you better,” Lara Jamison says. Then she turns to me. “Ivy, nice to see you again.”
As though she hadn’t been wrestling me for a gun the last time we were in a room together. As though she weren’t spewing lies about Cal every chance she gets. I gape at her, too horrified to fake even a sliver of politeness, and she lets out a light laugh. “Darren, from the look of things, you could have prepared them better,” she says.
Darren. Darren. Oh my God. Mateo’s father is D.
“Sorry, angel,” Mr. Wojcik says, giving her a worshipful glance before turning his attention back to his son. “Mateo, I know this is going to take some getting used to. You kids have been through a rough time. But so has Lara, and you’ve all made it to the other side, so it seemed like the right time to let you know…”
Then he says some more things. But I don’t hear them, because Lara lifts her left hand to tuck a wisp of hair behind her ear, and blood starts pounding in my ears as I see the flash of a new diamond on her finger.
She doesn’t care about Mr. Wojcik. I know she doesn’t, because Cal told us what she’d said in her house about D—ultimately, he was just another distraction. But now that she has to play nice with the police and buff up her image, he’s useful. There’s no better PR than getting engaged to the father of one of the kids involved in the Carlton drug bust. After all, if he believes her story, then it must be true.
Turns out I was almost exactly right when I’d told Mateo that Lara probably had some clueless guy trailing after her like a puppy. I just didn’t realize it was his dad.
All of my senses sharpen as I take hold of Mateo’s hand and spin on my heel, pulling him toward the door. “Come on,” I say, ignoring the startled look of a passing server. “We’re getting out of here.”
“And going where?” Mateo asks. His voice is hoarse and ragged, like he just woke up from a nightmare and found reality even worse. “Do I need to remind you we don’t have a car?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say, even though it obviously does. But that’s purely a logistical problem, and right now, we need to be thinking bigger than that. We reach the restaurant door and I shove it open with my free hand, every cell in my body thrumming with purpose.
“We’re going scorched earth,” I say.
I turned in a first draft of this book to my editor in January 2020, and began revising it two months later—at the beginning of what would become a world-changing pandemic. Like every industry, publishing scrambled to adapt, and I have many people to thank for keeping You’ll Be the Death of Me on track during so much upheaval.