Review her notes, cross-reference the statements Ghost had made in the meeting with what she already had on the missing women. Plan her approach for tomorrow.
Instead, she caught herself replaying the way he’d crowded into her space, just enough to make her feel the heat coming off him. Not threatening, exactly, but intense. Like he’d been holding himself back, and if she’d so much as leaned in, he might have?—
She pressed her fists to her forehead.
No. No, no, a bazillion times over no! Not happening. She had too much else going on right now.
Get a grip. You’re not here for Ghost. You’re here for Leelee. For Mary Rose. For the girls who never made it home.
Her phone buzzed with a text.
You’re back in town and you didn’t call me??? I had to hear it from Mariah who heard it from Nessie!
Shit. Greta. Her best friend. She should’ve been Naomi’s first stop when she arrived back in Solace, but instead she’d hidden away in her rental house, poring over case files and trying to make sense of why she’d thrown away her career.
She typed back quickly.
Sorry. Needed some time to decompress. I was going to call you.
Almost as soon as she hit send, the phone rang, and Greta’s face filled her screen. The picture was one Naomi had snappedduring a hike last summer, Greta making a face for the camera at the top of Burnt Peak.
She almost didn’t answer. Just stared at Greta’s goofy, sunburned face, lighting up the screen, wanting to throw the whole thing across the room.
But that was coward shit, and she wasn’t built that way.
She accepted the call. “Hey.”
“Are you okay?”
Her throat tightened. Greta had been her anchor through everything—Mary Rose’s disappearance when they were kids, the FBI academy, the brutal cases that followed, the slow realization that the job was eating her alive from the inside out. She deserved better than radio silence.
Water wasn’t cutting it. She needed something harder. She found the box that contained the entire contents of her old apartment’s kitchen. There was the bottle of whiskey she’d gotten from a secret Santa office party last December. She didn’t drink much as a rule—not since her parents were killed by a drunk driver when she was twelve—and she wasn’t generally a whiskey fan, but here she was, pawing through packing paper at the bottom of a moving box for a cheap bottle and a chipped mug.
Classy.
She poured two fingers and knocked it back. It tasted the way gasoline smelled, but she didn’t even flinch.
Somewhere in the background, Greta was still talking. “Naomi. Did you hear me?”
“Yeah, I’m here,” Naomi said, voice rough. She pressed her hip against the counter, bottle in hand, and stared into the wild darkness outside her window.
“So? Are you okay or not?”
“I’m okay,” she assured as she splashed some more whiskey into her mug. “Just needed some space to breathe and figure things out.”
She braced herself for the guilt trip, but Greta’s voice was gentle, not scolding. “Don’t go dark on me, Nomi. I worry.”
“I know. Tell you what, let’s do a girls’ night Friday.” She could take one night off, couldn’t she? Not without guilt, but she’d do it for Greta. “I’ll bring ice cream.”
“Ah, bribing me with ice cream?”
“I know the way back into your good graces is through your stomach.”
Greta laughed. “Manipulation. I like it. And this is why we’re friends. But, fair warning, you’ll need a lot of ice cream. I’m very annoyed you didn’t tell me you were coming home for a visit.”
Naomi scanned the boxes stacked around her and decided to wait until she saw Greta in person to break the news that she wasn’t just visiting. Maybe it, along with the ice cream, would take the sting out of forgetting to call.
Greta was still rambling, but Naomi let the sound of her best friend’s voice fill up the empty places in her brain. She sipped more whiskey. Let it burn.
