“So, Jude?” Zachariah said quietly from a couple seats away.
He was a soft-spoken guy, so I had to strain to hear him. “What’s up, Zach?”
“I went up to Marker Motors to order some parts last week, and I heard Marker say he was looking for a body guy.”
“Did he, now?”
“Yeah. He was grumbling about his guy moving away to get married. Marker’s a good dude, too. I like ’im.”
“Do you know him well?” I had to ask. “If I just walked in there and filled out an application, I’d never get a call.”
“Why not?” asked Dylan Shipley.
“My resume is pretty shaky,” I said, which made a few people laugh. “Seriously, though. There’s always a box to check that asks if you’ve been convicted of a crime. You check that box, nobody calls you back. The end.”
Griffin refilled his girlfriend’s wine glass, a thoughtful expression on his face. “What if we all had to confess the worst thing we’d ever done to the people we meet—the meanest thing you ever said or the most careless you’ve ever been?” He made a face. “It wouldn’t be pretty. Just because someone hasn’t broken the law doesn’t mean they’re a good person.”
Zara set her water glass down with a thunk. “I’d never have a job again if confession was a requirement.”
“You’re not mean!” Audrey cried. “You’re the nicest person in Vermont.”
Zara shook her head. “Not always. And I was a horrible teenager. Really the worst. My mother went entirely gray—every hair on her head—between my thirteenth and my eighteenth year.” She put a hand to her belly. “I hope karma isn’t real, or I’m in trouble with this one.”
Everyone laughed.
“If we’re all going to write down our most embarrassing thing…” Ruth paused to think before she finished her sentence. “We should also be able to write down the best thing we’ve ever done. That counts, too.”
There were murmurs of agreement, but I didn’t feel soothed. The worst thing I’d done was easy enough to identify. But the best thing I’d ever done? Well, I hadn’t done it yet. I hoped.
*
“You just missed Sophie,” my father said as I entered the garage the next day after going out to buy sandwiches.
Damn it, my heart said even as my asshole brain said, Good thing. “What did she want?”
“To give you this.” He passed me a sheet of paper folded in two.
I flipped open the note.
Jude—
I found a good use of the money you made off the Porsche parts. I donated it to a great cause, and I really want you to see the results. Meet me at the hospital tomorrow at ten AM in the Neurology Department on the second floor, B-Wing.
—Sophie
“Uh. I guess I have to go somewhere tomorrow morning for a couple hours.”
“Okay.”
I read the letter three more times, looking for clues. Her instructions didn’t leave any room for argument—she just ordered me to show up. That pissed me off for about two seconds, maybe three. Then I spent the next twenty-four hours counting down until I could see Sophie, if only for a few minutes.
The hospital was only a fifteen-minute drive away, but I hadn’t accounted for all the snow we’d been getting. The parking lot’s snow banks were so high that it took me extra time to find a spot. By the time I made it to the Neurology Department I was about five minutes late. Sophie wasn’t in the waiting room.
“Are you Jude?” a woman wearing scrubs asked me.
“Yeah.”
“Please come with me. Sophie has already gone into the auditory testing room. You’re going to watch from here.”
I followed her into a darkened, closet-sized room with a window and two chairs in it. The window was one-way glass, so I could see into an office with a table and chairs and a desk with an unusual computer on it.
There were four people there, but my eyes found Sophie first. She looked ridiculously beautiful in a soft blue sweater and black pants. She bent over a toddler—a little girl who was sitting on her mother’s lap. Sophie seemed to be trying to entertain the child while a technician in a lab coat fit something over her ear. A hearing aid, maybe?
The toddler watched Sophie with a rapt expression as Sophie held out a book—the kind with the cardboard pages that babies can’t destroy very easily. “What’s this?” Sophie asked, opening to a page I couldn’t see.
With one hand, the toddler raised her fingers up in the air and made a bouncing motion.
“Bunny!” said her mother behind her. “Good girl.”
“Okay, we’re all set,” the technician said, leaving the hearing aid on the baby and walking around the desk to take a seat in front of the computer monitor. “I’ll just need a minute to make some adjustments.”
Sophie had told me about her case with the deaf toddler who needed cochlear implants. But she’d never told me how that had turned out. This must be the child?