Page 27 of Spies Don’t Fall for Their Best Friend

“Oh, don’t give me that. Both of you forget how old you are every year. And the binder isn’t gossip. It’s information.”

“Community information,” Helen adds.

Marge starts counting on her fingers. “We know who’s recovering from surgery, who lost a spouse. Whose grandson is home from college.”

“Who just had a baby,” Helen says.

Barbara nods once. “Practical things.”

“And birthdays!” Helen says brightly. “You’d be amazed how many lonely people light up when someone remembers their birthday.”

Marge turns to me. “So, you were right about one thing.”

“The intelligence network?”

“Well…” Marge exchanges a glance with the others. “Let’s just say if somebody new moves into our part of Cloakwood, we usually know their dog’s name before they do.”

If I ever need information about something in Cloakwood, I’ll be sure to go to these women.

Barbara straightens proudly. “And for the record…” She pats the binder. “…I do categorize it.” Then she squints at me. “You live over on Juniper, right?”

I blink. “…Yes.”

“I told you it was Juniper,” Barbara says to the other two.

“We don’t get over to that part of town often,” Helen says. “But we all think you’re the cutest couple. How long have you been married?”

Reese had been taking a drink of her lemonade and nearly chokes on it. We both manage to say at the same time, “We’re not married.”

“Oh?” Marge says. “Engaged?”

Reese is shaking her head a little too strongly.

“Dating?” Helen asks.

“Friends,” Reese says.

Helen shrugs. “You are just so comfortable together. Like you belong.”

“And you laugh together a lot,” Marge says. “As if you’ve got years' worth of inside jokes built up.”

They’ve got it all wrong. Reese doesn’t want dating or anything beyond. She’s made that abundantly clear.

“That’s because we’re best friends,” Reese says. “We have been for a while now.”

The women are all just looking at us, expectantly, so I elaborate. “We both grew up in Cipher Springs, but I was a year older in school⁠—”

“—so we didn’t really know each other well,” Reese finishes. “It wasn’t until we both went to the same college, and I ran into him at the library three Tuesdays in a row that we became friends.”

I chuckle. “The first week, she just came over, said, ‘Oh, hey, a fellow fox!’”

“That’s Cipher Springs’ school mascot, right?” Marge asks.

I nod. “And the second week she came over, she asked how the test I’d been studying for the week before went. The third Tuesday, she sat down as if it had already been decided that we were BFFs, and that we meet to study in the library on Tuesdays.”

“And we’ve been doing everything together ever since,” Reese says. “I highly recommend repeated accidental proximity as a top-notch method of making friends.”

The part I don’t tell them was how, about a year after that moment, I’d asked Reese to go to the Student Government Association’s Winter Ball with me. I hadn’t even finished asking the question before a look of horror and fear crossed her face. Not at going to the Winter Ball—the horror and fear were that I was trying to nudge our friendship toward a relationship.