“We’re talking.”
Ivy took another bite of cake. She had been to the café four times in the past week. It was new for her. Before, she had allowed herself two slices of the red velvet per year, and even then, she had only half.
Now, she’d clean her plate, and she would lick her finger and sweep it around the plate to clean up the crumbs.
“We can’t talk here.” Daniel looked left and right again. He leaned forward. “It’s important.”
Ivy considered him, and a heavy blanket of guilt wrapped itself around her shoulders. “Is it as important as my little visit to your place of work?” She cut off a large wedge of cake and stuffed it in her mouth, but suddenly, she couldn’t taste it. It weighed on her tongue like thick kindergarten paste.
“Yes. More. I need to apologize. So can you just come with me? Please? I’ll buy you more cake.”
Ivy eyed the last few bites, but pushed it away. She dropped five dollars on the table. “It’s fine. Let’s go.”
She followed her brother to his car, and they pulled away from the restaurant. For a moment, her heart sped up. Was he taking her to the station? Did they find something? But then he turned left, toward the park instead of the station, and her heart slowed.
“I’ll drop you back at the café,” he promised. “Or wherever you were parked.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Excuse me?”
Ivy fiddled with a thread coming loose from her shorts. “I walked.”
He blinked at her. “That’s, like . . . almost four miles, Ivy.”
“Yeah, well. I needed to work off the cake I was going to eat.”
That was a lie. She didn’t care about eating cake anymore. She walked often. She hadn’t liked driving before, and she especially didn’t now. Mattie used to drive her, sometimes, in his new car before the accident. But she hadn’t spoken to him much since the kiss. She knew it didn’t mean much, but she was afraid she’d just messed things up more by kissing him.
And, deep down, she knew she’d only complicated things so she had something else to worry about. Something else to concentrate on.
Something besides Stratford.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t attracted to Mattie, because she was. And it wasn’t that she didn’t want him, because she did. It was that in that moment, she had needed Mattie, and he had needed her, and they had needed each other. She’d needed someone to understand her. And now, she missed him fiercely, and she hoped he missed her, too.
Daniel cleared his throat. “We needed to talk about something.”
Ivy gripped the seat belt, her nails biting into the smooth material. “Sure.” Her blood was hot-cold. She closed the air-conditioning vents.
“I needed to, well . . . I needed to apologize. And I needed to clear something up, okay?” He put on his blinker and the car moved into the park.
“What?” She watched the trees pass by the window. A group of girls jumped rope in a patch of grass, ponytails swinging. She half smiled.
“I never really thought you had anything to do with it.”
“Then why did you bring me in? Why did you try to scare me and embarrass me?”
His fingers tightened around the gear shift. “Can this stay between us, Ivy?”
She nodded.
“I was trying to draw out Mrs. Stratford. I believe, I know, she had something to do with it. I just can’t prove it just yet. And I knew she was watching you. So I thought if I brought you in, maybe she’d make a mistake. Say too much.”
Ivy suddenly felt hot. She flipped the air-conditioning vents back open. Ivy didn’t want him to discover the truth, but she didn’t want him blaming Mrs. Stratford, either.
“How is the case going?” she asked breezily as they drove around a small duck pond. A little boy tossed bits of bread to a few floating ducks and their ducklings.
He shook his head. “It’s been hard, Ivy. We’re not getting a lot of leads. Your classmate, Kip, was the last one to see him, as far as we can tell. But now we’re wondering if he saw him at all. Apparently, a neighbor cuts through the parking lot most nights to get home—and we think he may have seen this neighbor instead. The police chief wants to question the rest of your class.”
Ivy’s hands started to shake. She tucked them beneath her legs. “Dad will be mad if you bring me in again.”
Daniel paused. “Can you keep a secret? It’ll cost me my job if this gets out.” He shifted awkwardly.
Ivy nodded, keeping still. “I’m a steel trap.” Her voice quavered.
“We found the body.”
Suddenly, Ivy began to shake. She began to shake so hard she couldn’t stop it or hide it. “He’s . . . dead?”
“You’re upset.” Her brother touched her shoulder.