“I hope you don’t mind,” he says, “but Nick Emerling wants to hijack me tonight for a cocktail party at the dance museum. I know we’d talked about going out to dinner since it’s Friday night, but it’s probably best not to turn him down.”
“Of course, you go,” I say, though I’m not thrilled. It’s the second dinner in a week to be hijacked by Guy’s job. “There’s chicken tagine left from last night, and it’s crazy to waste it. I can just reheat that for us when you get in.”
“Sounds good.”
There’s an odd flatness in his tone.
“Is something wrong?”
“Not wrong, but frankly I’m a little mystified. I just heard that you went to the caterer’s office and accused them of stealing the money.”
“That woman Eve called you?” Why am I surprised? I should have predicted she’d pull a move like that.
“Not me directly, but she talked to Miranda,” he says, referring to his executive assistant.
“I didn’t out-and-out accuse her. But I told her that the money was there when her team arrived and missing after they left. I searched everyplace this morning, by the way.” As I’m talking, I realize I probably should have given Guy a heads-up.
“I just wish you’d told me before you decided to take this on. It’s related to my business. If the catering firm ends up in a snit, we may not be able to use them again.”
“Well, if one of them did take the money, you’d hardly want to use the company again anyway. But you’re right, I should have let you know. By the way, that woman actually had the gall to say I ought to ask you about it.”
“What?”
“She said I should ask you about your guests. That one of them could have stolen the money.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“You sure?”
“Of course. I hardly think there was a kleptomaniac in the mix last night.”
“Why did she call? To complain about my coming down there?”
“According to Miranda, she was upset. She’s probably worried about losing the business. How’d you leave it with her?”
“She claimed that she’d look into it, talk to the waiters.”
“Well, regardless of what she says, please let it go after this. It’s a hundred and sixty bucks, not the end of the world.”
“It’s not the money that’s really bothering me. It’s the matches. They were meant as a threat of some kind. I just feel it.”
“I still think that’s just a weird coincidence. Look, I’d better get back to work. I’ll see you around eight, okay?”
I spend the early evening answering new emails from my assistant. Finally finished, I settle back to respond more fully to my brother’s email from yesterday. Because of the crazy time difference between here and Jakarta, phone conversations are tricky for us, so we do a lot of our communicating online these days.
I adore my brother, and though we’ve always been close—he’s two years younger than me—our mother’s death twelve years ago, followed one brutal year later by our father’s, made our bond even tighter. I hate being so far apart, and I know he does, too. He’s hoping to relocate back to the States within the next few years.
As connected as we were in our grief, we handled things totally differently. For Will, the dual loss was a hole that desperately needed to be filled. Within six months of my father’s death he was engaged to his girlfriend, someone I never pictured him marrying, though for now it seems to be working out, and they already have two small children.
I yearned for the complete opposite—nothing to tie me down anymore. I ditched the guy I’d been seeing for six months and quit my job as a newspaper reporter in order to tackle my first book. When the research part was finished, I took off for Europe for almost a year, doing the actual writing there. The constant motion—moving from one city to the next, writing in endless cafés, and jogging at dusk each night through whatever park was nearby—helped to keep the crushing grief at bay. That’s what makes my current lethargy so frustrating. I know it’s not helping in any way.
I ask Will about his job and family and toss out a few details about Saratoga. Since the accident, he’s been worried about me—he was on a flight to New York as soon as he learned the news—and it would be great to confide in him how stuck I feel, but I don’t want him fretting about me when there’s nothing he can do while continents away.