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“That bad, huh?” Dash looks over, amused.
“Not if you’re the sort of person who enjoys walking a social tightrope.” I massage the back of my neck, exhausted from all that smiling. “I didn’t understand before, but I get it now, why you hired me. Zelda is a force to be reckoned with. And weirdly interested in my fertility plans.”
Dash winces. “Yeah, about that.”
“What?” I turn, narrowing my eyes.
He looks sheepish. “There’s a slight chance I said something this morning that made Zelda think that you are future wife material.”
I pause. “Slight?”
“OK, maybe I told her I was planning to propose. But only because she wasn’t buying me as committed just yet!” he adds hurriedly, pulling into a drive-thru line.
“I’ll have you committed!” I whack him on the arm. The tanned, surprisingly muscular arm.
“Hey!” he protests, gripping the wheel. “Girlfriend, fiancée, what’s the difference, really?”
“And with that attitude, is it any wonder you have neither?” I let out a groan, sinking back in the seat. “You could have warned me! Ideally, before I wound up fending off questions about my egg reserve!”
Dash chuckles. “OK, she can be intense, but her heart is in the right place. She’s only looking out for me.”
It’s our turn at the window, so I request a bucket load of fries and the biggest burger they’ve got. Dash looks confused as we move along.
“The burgers at the club are the best around. Why didn’t you get one there?”
“I don’t have time to explain the social minefield that is a woman’s food order,” I tell him, greedily taking the paper bags of junk food. “But long story short: your grandmother would never have accepted me as her future daughter-in-law if she saw me stuffing my face. Like this.”
I dive into the fries.
Dash chuckles. He pulls over in the parking lot, and starts to eat his own, and for a moment, there’s a companionable silence, broken only by rustling food wrappers and my sighs of relief.
“Cocktails,” Dash says finally.
“I mean, sure.” I agree. “It’s after five.”
He smiles. “No, if you want to bond with Zelda. She has a thing for classic cocktails. Knows the history of every drink, the whole nine yards.”
“OK, I can work with that.” I nod. “And if not, I’ll be too drunk to care.”
“Also, she can’t get enough of true crime podcasts. The bloodier, the better. And she loves Taylor Swift.” He adds.
I stop. “Now you’re just yanking my chain.”
“Promise!” Dash says, laughing. “Piper was really into her growing up. Zelda took her to all the concerts, helped her make special T-shirts, everything.”
“Oh.” I pause. It would be easy to write Zelda off as an interfering old biddy, but it sounds like she’s actually a really cool person. “You moved in with her after your parents…?” I trail off.
He nods. “I was away at boarding school when it happened,” he says slowly. “Zelda didn’t want me to find out over the phone, so she booked the next flight out to tell me in person. Piper was only eight,” he adds. “She was a mess after the funeral, and I couldn’t leave her again, so I transferred to a school here. Then it was just the three of us.”
He looks straight ahead for a moment, lost in memories, and I think it’s the first time I’ve seen him without a cocky smile on his face.
I reach out and take his hand without thinking. Losing one parent so young would be traumatic enough, but losing both at the same time?
I can’t imagine it.
I squeeze his hand in sympathy, and Dash looks back at me, like he’s remembering I’m sitting here.
“But anyway,” he says, dropping my hand. “It was a long time ago. Ancient history.”
