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“How about this? I’ll call Hudson and see if he’s heard from Ziggy, okay?”
She pulled her phone from her pack. Hud had put his number into her phone when she first got it, and now it rang.
And rang.
And rang.
And finally flipped to a voice that said he hadn’t yet set up his mailbox.
So, there was that. And she didn’t know why she was so disappointed. Barely friends. Yes, apparently.
“Does this mean we get tickets to the game?” Shae asked.
Iris folded her arms on the table and sank her head onto them.
Ned pushed his fries toward her. “Could be worse.”
“How’s that?” She looked up and gave in, grabbing a fry.
“You could have Fraser staying with you.”
Five
See, she was back in her life, and everything was fine.
Everybody calm down.
“I love these open-air stadiums in the fall. I know it’s just an exhibition game, but it brings me back to NCAA football. There’s a smell in the air.” Iris walked the field of the Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Sportpark, in the borough of Pankow, in a northern suburb of Berlin. The air held a nip, but the sky overhead cast blue and wispy.
The scent of fall hung in the air, not so different from the autumn husk of Minnesota, and for some reason, the craziness of the last week had sort of fallen away over the past two days of being back at work.
Watching tape, talking through angles of viewing, slowing down questionable moments, and talking through the regulations.
It helped that she’d put Jonas and her father on a plane yesterday, even if Ned and Shae had stayed behind. She had a feeling that her brother had more on his brain than protecting his big sister with his insistence on sticking around. He’d been on the phone in the second bedroom of their Airbnb for the better part of a half hour last night, pacing.
Shae had mentioned it had something to do with his SEAL team, but it was all hush-hush and clandestine.
Today, he and Shae had set off to see Berlin, so maybe this was a getaway of sorts for them, the replacement of the one that had been cut short weeks earlier when he’d been deployed suddenly.
And right about the time Shae had been kidnapped, so yeah, Iris would give them a little room.
Fact was, maybe if they could all just keep moving forward, they could forget the past two weeks had even happened.
“That smell is called smog,” said Zach, walking the field with her.
“Oh, please. Germany is about the cleanest country I’ve ever been in.”
Zach grinned, and his eyes probably sparkled under his Oakleys. Once upon a time, she’d harbored the smallest of crushes on Zach. But he was too much like herself—driven, bossy, maybe a little hard to get to know.
Huh. She’d never considered that about herself before, but maybe. She thought of it more as being independent.
Zach put his hand to shade his eyes, turning in the field. “The field runs almost north-south, and they’ve moved the game up to one p.m, so tomorrow the sun should be right about…” He turned and indicated a point in the sky just a little higher than the sun’s current position. “Could be a lot of missed passes over the left shoulder.”
“That’s not my job anymore,” she said, and glanced at Zach. “Get ready for the wideouts to come at you for missed pass interference calls. You have all the fun.”
He laughed. “Oh, you’ll miss fighting with Hudson Bly, don’t try and deny it.”
She shook her head, trying not to let the words find soil.
