Page 22 of Over Her Dead Body

We don’t speak again until he reaches the building and pushes open the door.

I follow him inside because apparently this is where my standards are now, but also because I am drunk in a foreign country with no hotel reservation and a phone full of messages I refuse to answer.

The staircase is narrow, stone, worn in the center by centuries of people going up and not thinking about it. Reid is two steps ahead of me.

My phone vibrates inside my bag.

I don’t need to look to know who it is. By now, ignoring Margot has stopped being an accident and become a decision.

I miss the second step and catch myself on the rail.

Reid doesn’t turn around.

Good.

One humiliation at a time.

I look at the back of his neck.

For one stupid second, I remember exactly what it felt like to put my mouth there.

Then I think about pushing him down the stairs.

Apparently ten years of grief and several glasses of wine have made room for both.

He unlocks the door and steps aside.

The apartment is small enough that pretending otherwise would be insulting. One room doing the work of several. Bed. Desk. Narrow kitchen. Books on every available surface. A lamp with a repaired base. A coat on a chair. A dish towel drying near the sink.

Not a temporary life. Not a hideout.

A life.

It is not the books that get me, though the books are offensive for separate reasons. It is not even the fact that he has a preferred whiskey and a preferred bar and enough Portuguese to order both.

It is the dish towel.

The fact that he has made a home here.

“Water?” he asks.

“No.”

“You should have some.”

“You should answer a question without turning it into a psychological experiment.”

He closes the door. The sound of it is small and final.

We are standing four feet apart in his apartment in Lisbon, and every hour between here and Austin is in the room with us now.

“Say something useful,” I tell him.

He slips his keys into a bowl beside the door. “You’re going to regret coming inside.”

“Is that a threat?”

“It’s an observation.”