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His eyes meet mine, and I feel a flutter. But then I look away. It takes me a while to answer. I kind of want to make him sweat. “Fine,” I say, “as long as you know it might not be very interesting.”
“I know.”
“And the cops might actually be really pissed at me, if they find out.”
“I’m fully prepared for angry cops.”
“Okay...” I glance at what I presume is his car, a blue Chevy, at one of the other pumps. “You want to ride with me, or do you want to follow?”
No surprise: Paul says he’ll ride with me. He moves his car into a regular parking space, then climbs into my passenger seat—there’s no way I’m playing damsel in distress and letting him drive. We pull out of the lot, the windshield wipers groaning to deflect the driving rain, the fog so thick we can only see the taillights of cars once we’ve almost crashed into them. Still, I white-knuckle it through the tunnel, and once we’re in the city, the fog isn’t quite as bad.
“So where are we off to?” Paul asks.
“Cobalt—up north. I think the woman Greg was sleeping with has family there, and I want to ask them some questions.”
His eyebrows shoot up. “You mean e-mail girl? Lolita?”
“Sort of.” I’m not sure I trust him enough to go into Sienna’s role in the e-mails, so I say, “Kit’s daughter is certain he was having an affair, and I have a strange feeling it might be one of her friends. Her name’s Raina Hammond.” I search his face, seeing if Raina’s name rings a bell. He’s Greg’s ghostwriter, after all. But Paul just blinks. “Thanks to the hack, I was able to look into her. There are a lot of things about her that don’t add up. So that’s why I’m going to check out her family.”
As we cross another bridge and get on the highway that runs parallel to the city and leads us to the northbound roads toward Cobalt, we discuss Raina: her good looks, her lies about being a student at Aldrich, and her strange behavior, including the naked, unapologetic grief when she came over the morning after Greg was found murdered. “It just seemedodd,” I murmur. “She’s his stepdaughter’s friend. It wasn’t appropriate emotion.”
“Yeah, but if she killed him, would she have carried on like that?” Paul asks.
The heat is blowing into my face, so I lower it a bit. “Unless she thought acting distraught was a good cover.”
“Yeah, but you really think a nineteen-year-old girl is capable of murder?”
A fresh bout of rain pounds us, and I hit the stalk for the windshield wipers. “I don’t know. But I feel like she’s involved somehow. Sienna was so adamant to keep her out of the conversation. Maybe she was protecting her.”
“Have you looked up Sienna’s e-mails in the hack? Maybe she and Raina talk about it there.”
I nod, careful not to say anything about how Sienna was Lolita. “There’s nothing about Raina. No secrets whatsoever, actually.”
Paul runs his hand over his hair. “I’m gladIwasn’t hacked. I’m beyond careless with my e-mail. It really puts things in perspective.”
“You?” I glance at him. “Got anything juicy about local rock bands you cover?”
“Nah.” Paul shrugs noncommittally. “Just angry divorce stuff, mostly.”
His face clouds over. I want to ask him about his divorce, but it’s a level of intimacy I’m not ready for. In fact, eventhis—letting a near stranger into my car for a long drive up north—is usually too intimate for me. LA Willa would never have done such a thing. The past shapes much of why that is, but it’s also that I’ve been such a loner for so long, I’m more comfortable doing things by myself. When I’m alone, I don’t need to be anyone I’m not. I don’t need to search for things to say. I don’t need to have to anticipate reactions—or, in the worst-case scenario, be caught off guard by total changes in character.
“I can’t believe you remember that dinner at the Indian place,” Paul suddenly says.
I turn to him. “You can’t believeIremember it?”
He smiles. “It was so long ago. And I never heard from you afterward, so I figured it didn’t mean much to you.”
I’m so surprised that I burst out laughing. “I think you have some of the details wrong.”
He cocks his head. “How so?”
I let my gaze rest on a Massachusetts license plate ahead of us. The dinner Paul is talking about was an end-of-the-year lit mag celebration at Tandoori, an Indian restaurant in Blue Hill. Paul and I happened to get there at the same time, and we walked in together. As though sensing my greatest longings, he chose a seat next to me at the table, and we spent the evening talking. It was a funny, dazzling, seventy-two minutes of bullshitting about music and writing and his upcoming sojourn to Princeton, and how uncool most people were, and how there really weren’t very many people worth talking to. It was one of those times when I was completely aware of the magic I was experiencing as I was experiencing it; I descended further and further into nostalgia as each course arrived, knowing that once everything was eaten, we would be one step closer to the meal’s end. When our advisor, Mr. Hand, finally paid the check, I prayed that Paul would ask me to take a walk so we could continue talking. But then his mom showed up, and he ducked into the car with a crinkly smile, saying he’d see me around this summer.
I daydreamed about that dinner afterward. I picked apart everything Paul said to me. I tried to figure out everything I could about him—where he lived, what he was up to that summer—but because the Internet didn’t exist yet, it wasn’t easy. I prayed Paul would get my phone number from someone and call me, but it didn’t happen. At the end of that summer, he went to Princeton. That fall, a drunk driver killed my mom. I started going to the punk clubs Paul used to frequent—basically, Ibecamethe cool, spidery girls he used to date. Not that he was there to see it. Though by then I stopped caring what he thought. Whatanyonethought.
Not long after that, the thing happened that ruined me for good.In some ways, if I look back on it, that dinner with Paul was the last good day I had in this town. The last ray of sunshine.
“You didn’t callme,” I say now. I try to temper my emotions, keeping my gaze steady on the road. “Not the other way around.”And I waited,I wanted to add.God, how I waited.
