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“Your mom died!” Fletch slips the phone in his pocket and presses his hand to her shoulder, then he spins her so fast, soda sloshes over the edge of her glass. “I was giving you a hard time. I was touching without your consent! And you didn’t think to say,Hey, dickhead, I’m having a tough time right now. Back off?”
“You should never touch without consent,” she counters blandly. “Deceased mothers shouldn’t be the standard you base your morals on.”
“I was screwing around! I hugged. You hit. It was a game of hot and cold. Fuck, Sera. Your mom died?”
“We all die eventually.” She turns back to me. “Can you confirm my leave? I still have to book flights and organize…” She stops, then shakes her head. “Stuff. So much stuff.”
“Of course.” Though Archer’s hand rests on my hip, his fingers kneading, and his chest warming my back, I step out of his hold and steer Seraphina toward a stool. I push her down to sit, then I take the seat beside hers while Aubree cuts through us both and perches her ass on the bar. “Is there anything we can do to help? We can make arrangements too.”
Seraphina laughs—not one of those humor-filled guffaws, but a pitying‘oh honey’. “I organizeyourlife, Mayet. I’m not sure what you think you can do to help.”
“Well…” Stumped, I concede with a nod. “Okay, point taken. But we’re not gonna ignore this and leave you to it. Your mom died!”
“And though I realize this is new information for you, it’s not new for me.” Looking up from her soda, she meets my eyes. “I’d appreciate it if you stopped saying that.”
“I’m sorry. You’re right.” I bring a hand up and rub it along my chin. “Shit. Okay. Your leave has been approved, effective immediately. Your position at the George Stanley remains yours whenever you return.”
“Two weeks at the most.”
“You could take months,” I insist, “and still, your job is safe.”
“Probably closer to four or five days,” she mumbles. “These things can be done quite fast, with the right motivation.” She looks back to her soda. “She died of illness. Nothing suspicious. So arrangements can be made immediately.”
“What was she sick from?” Archer asks.
“Where’s home?” Fletch cuts in. “Will you have someone on the other end to collect you from the airport?”
“She was a poorly kept diabetic.” She runs her finger around the lip of her glass.Ignoring Fletch? Or simply… introspective?“I did the best I could from afar, but my mother was narcissistic in all the worst ways. It probably makes me a terrible person for deserting her when she needed help, but she was a sinking ship. She refused to save herself, and I was disinterested in being her verbal punching bag.”
“That doesn’t make you a bad person.” Archer steps closer and strokes the warm skin behind my ear. “My father’s dying.” He shrugs. “I haven’t gone to see him.”
Thoughtful, she pulls her bottom lip between her teeth and meets his eyes. “You have my condolences, Detective Malone.”
“And you have mine. We do the best we can with the material we’ve got, Fifi. Sometimes, people just fucking suck.”
“Fuckin’ A.” Fletch raises his soda in toast. “Assholes don’t get a free pass just because they’re our parents. Abuse is abuse, and being related doesn’t make that okay.”
“My parents were mostly absent,” I murmur. “They were good people. Kind. But they were never around.”
“And mine are amazing,” Aubree whispers. “I don’t say that to gloat. It just makes me really sad that the rest of you didn’t get what I have.”
“Yeah, well…” Seraphina perches her straw between her lips and sips. “My father died a long time ago, and my mother has been a wretched sack of misery ever since. Every carer I hired over the years, she scared off within a week or two. What else could I do?”
“You did what you could.” Fletch raises his hand as though to rest it on her shoulder, but maybe that thing about non-consensual touch plays through his mind, because he awkwardly drops it and digs it into his pocket instead. “We have to pull away and save ourselves sometimes, Sera. When they won’t help themselves, we’re allowed to step away and do what’s right for us.”
Jada.His ex-wife. The addict who refuses to stop. Fletch knows exactly what it means to jump ship and save oneself.
Not knowing his history, or simply not connecting the dots, Seraphina shrugs. “I put her in a home for the last year. Paid a fortune for the pleasure, and ate ramen and lettuce to get by. Now she’s gone, and I have to fly to Claremore, Oklahoma, like I actually want to be there.”
“Claremore!” Now Fletch’s eyes dance with humor. “Jesus, hillbilly. Are you gonna bury her with Will Rogers?”
Slowly, she turns to face him with an incredulous stare. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I’m sorry!” He barks out a giggle that blows her hair back. “You said Claremore, so I instantly saw Will Rogers. You’re a small-town country girl? What the fuck?”
“I’m Seraphina Lewis,” she counters seriously. “Copeland City resident. Head of media relations at the George Stanley. And you…” She purses her lips as Tim drops plates of food on the bar. “Have a dinner to go to, don’t you?”
“Well—”
