Silence.
I pulled into my driveway.
As I stepped from my vehicle, Axel jumped from his. Little brown curls snuck out from beneath his red beanie, all covered by his thick, black puffer coat. As beautiful as Axel was with his angled jaw covered with a five o’clock shadow, strong nose, and big brown eyes, his cinched brows always made him look angry. They weren’t all that thick. Simone waxed them weekly. His forehead just crunched them down into his eyes.
Now more than ever.
Axel charged at me like a wolf after a bunny. “Have you talked to Simone?”
“Earlier,” I said, tossing my purse over my shoulder. “She said she got invited to a last-minute conference in the city or something?”
“She told me that too.” He crossed his arms against his chest, squinting me over. “But she didn’t tell me shit else. No one did.”
Cocking my head to the side, my stomach did that spinning thing again. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Bullshit,” he said, in the same tone I had read that text in earlier. Could it have been Axel? Had he seen something last night? “Something’s up, and you know it.”
It took everything I had not to swallow hard and swat at the bead of sweat forming above my brow. “What?”
“Margaret told me she came here last night,” he said. “Rhiannon told me about her meltdown at group, but she didn’t come to me to talk about it. She came to you.”
Did he know? Was he dancing around the whole truth for the same reason I was? Because neither of us wanted to admit it?
I loved Axel, but he was a smart, abrasive man. Any stereotypes that said gay men were sweet and feminine were laughable where Axel was involved.
Thinking back on those texts, I couldn’t hear his deep, raspy voice saying any of them. Admitting to his involvement, whatever that involvement was with the body, was something he would take to his grave. He and I had that in common.
“She did,” I said. “She came over, and we talked. Had a few drinks, passed out, and went on to work in the morning.”
Axel crossed his arms against his chest. “What did you talk about?”
“I mean, if you were upset, and you came to me to talk about it, I wouldn’t run my mouth about it to someone else.” I crossed my arms against my chest too. “But you could call her and?—”
“Something happened,” he snapped, stepping closer.
Now he looked more like a mom confiding in her best friend about her child being bullied at school. His brows were still furrowed, but his eyes were soft beneath them. “If she threw a bitch fit at group and insulted everyone there, then decided to leave town for a week without telling Junie goodbye first,something happened.”
“I wouldn’t say she threw a bitch fit,” I said, stalking toward my cabin. “And she didn’t just abandon her kid. Junie was already at school when she got the offer. It was a good opportunity, so she?—”
“Stop lying, Gwen. You’re not good at it.”
“And you’re not good at salting the road.” I gestured behind me. “I slid, like, half a dozen times on my way up here.”
“Quit diverting.”
“Quit asking me to betray my friend’s confidence.”
“I just want to know if something happened to her. If it did, that’s what she told you about last night. So is that?—”
“Fine.” I threw my hands in the air. “Fine, I’ll tell you. But don’t tell her I told you.”
Primarily because I knew he wasn’t going to back off, and I needed a few milliseconds to come up with a good lie.
Leaning back, he glanced me over, waiting for me to continue.
“Promise,” I said. “Promise you won’t tell her I betrayed her confidence.”
“I promise.”
