“You’re going to be the death of me,” I told him, which felt appropriate given the evening’s theme.
His mouth curved. “You started it.”
“I absolutely did not start it.”
“You came down those stairs looking like a 1920s bombshell.”
I had no response to that. I went to find the mason jar for the roses before the situation deteriorated further.
The guests arrived in clusters, like last time, but tonight they came in costume.
Some had committed fully. Paige had come as a 1920s bartender—high-waisted trousers, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up—and looked so entirely herself in it that I suspected she’d simply raided her own wardrobe. Piper had gone full Agatha Christie, a tea-length dress, sensible shoes, and a look of mild suspicion she was maintaining with impressive consistency. Eliza had worn a dark cape over her clothes and a brooch at her collar and somehow managed to look both elegant and slightly ominous without appearing to have tried at all.
Hannah arrived in a deep green dress with a feathered headband, already laughing at something before she’d fully cleared the door, and came straight to me. “This place looks incredible,” she said, taking in the cobwebs and the poison bottles and the roses. “Jasper helped you with this, didn’t he?”
“He brought those roses,” I said.
“Of course he did.” She grinned.
My grandparents came in just behind her, Grandpa in a flat cap and a tweed jacket he’d had for forty years that turned out to be accidentally perfect, and Grandma in a deep plum dress with a brooch at her collar and the air of a woman who had attended many country house parties in her time and survived all of them. Jasper’s Aunt Nancy was with them, magnificent in a feathered hat she informed me she had owned since 1987 and had been waiting for exactly the right occasion to wear. I told her this was unquestionably that occasion. She patted my cheek and went straight for the cookie plate.
Lucy swept in with Spencer just behind her, and I took one look at her and laughed out loud. Full flapper—fringe dress, long beaded necklace, a headband with a single dramatic feather. Spencer was in a charcoal suit with a wide tie and a fedora pushed back on his head, and he looked at Lucy with the expression of a man who knew he was the luckiest man in the world.
“Lady Margaret Holloway would be honored,” I told her.
“Lady Margaret Holloway would be intimidated,” Lucy said, and handed me her coat.
I welcomed everyone, introduced the case, and watched the room lean forward before I’d even finished.
“Lady Margaret Holloway, found dead in the drawing room of Ashwood Manor on the morning of October the fourteenth, 1923. A gathering of guests, any one of whom had reason to want her gone.” The room was already murmuring before I’d finished the setup, which was exactly what I wanted.
I called the first round. Envelopes were opened, clues read aloud, and the debate that followed was immediate and delightfully chaotic. Grandma had already produced a small notebook from her handbag and was writing things down with the focused intensity of someone intent on winning. Grandpa sat beside her with his flat cap pushed back and his clue card held at arm’s length, squinting at it with the expression of a man who had misplaced his reading glasses and was not going to admit it. Aunt Nancy, on Grandma’s other side, was reading her clue card with narrowed eyes of a woman who had worked the Pennywhistle long enough to have seen every kind of human behavior and trusted none of it.
I moved through the room answering questions with the practiced neutrality of someone who knew all the answers and was enjoying not giving them.
I was enjoying all of it, actually. The warm candlelit room, the costumes, the laughter rising and falling, the feeling of having made something that worked. Last time I had spent the whole evening half inside my own head, monitoring everything, braced for something to go wrong. Tonight I was just—here to enjoy it.
I caught Jasper’s eye across the room, and the look he gave me was pure heat—dark, hungry, and full of promise. It hit melike a spark to dry tinder, instantly flooding my mind with the memory of our kiss.
Beside him, Lucy had the expression of someone collecting evidence—except the evidence she was collecting had nothing to do with Lady Margaret Holloway and everything to do with the way Jasper was looking at me from across the room. She had her clue card in one hand and her teacup in the other, and she wasn’t entirely focused on either of them.
I caught Jasper’s eye, and he grinned at me, from across a room full of people in Halloween costumes arguing about a fictional murder, and I thought that this was possibly one of the best evenings of my life.
About fifteen minutes into the first round, I saw Jasper’s hand go to his pocket. He glanced at his phone, and something moved across his face—a tightening, quickly controlled—and he looked up at me with an apologetic half-nod, stood carefully, and slipped out the back.
Lucy noticed. She looked at me across the room with a question in her eyes, and I gave a small shake of my head and kept the round moving.
He came back when the five-minute break started, his expression composed and carefully neutral. He came straight to me at the back counter, close enough that no one else could hear.
“Sorry about that.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” He paused just a half-second too long. “It was Emmett. Nothing important.”
He didn’t offer more. His eyes were on my face, watchful in a way that told me he knew I’d clocked the fact that he hadn’t told me everything. I looked at him for a moment—this man who was usually so easy with me, so straightforward, so careful about saying true things—and felt a knot settle quietly in my stomach.Not alarm, exactly. Just the low hum of something being held back by someone who didn’t usually hold things back.
The room was full, and the second round was waiting, and this was not the moment.
