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Wyatt frowned at no one in particular. “Dude, I said I was sorry about the trunk. I’ll pay to fix the paint if you want, but nothing was stolen.”
“That’s not the point, man.”
“So does that mean you got a job and can afford to pay the loan and insurance?” Silence. “Didn’t think so. It’s stupid for you to take a car you can’t drive.”
“Okay, fine. Shit. Then can you mail me back the roadside kit?”
“The what?” Had Jared lost his fucking mind? “You want a roadside kit for a car you don’t have? Are you high, dude?”
“The kit was a present from my grandma, okay? It’s sentimental. Buy your own.”
“Yeah, whatever.” And Wyatt thought his own deal was strange. Jared was about to win a prize for bizarre requests. “I’ll mail it back when I get a chance, fuck.”
“Tomorrow.”
Not a chance, since he worked all day and the Weston post office was only open from nine to one every weekday. “I’ll mail it. Talk to you later.” Wyatt had ended the call and flopped onto the bed on his back, exhausted by the brief conversation.
He lay there, gazing up at the popcorn ceiling, confused by the bizarre way Jared was acting. At first, he’d been totally fine with Wyatt taking the car for an extended road trip. Maybe Wyatt hadn’t said he could be gone for as long as two months, but he was here now, with the car, and that was that. Not like Jared was going to go the fourth-grade route of reporting the car stolen just to get back at him. Jared would just have to deal with it for now, until Wyatt knew for sure what he was going to do.
One thing he was not going to do was go out of his way to mail a damned emergency roadside kit you could buy at any Walmart in the state. He’d never known Jared to be incredibly sentimental, so he could wait for his package.
Ramie’s headlights flashed in his window, and he checked the time on his phone. A little after seven. Must have had a day shift if she was home already. Wyatt didn’t always pay attention to her schedule, even though she posted it on the fridge. He lounged there for a while, his thoughts muddled by his conversation with Jared, and listened to the vague creaks of Ramie moving around in the kitchen. Then a long period of silence.
She hadn’t gone to her room. The television was off. Even if she was eating a late dinner in the kitchen, she usually played music or something. She said once that she didn’t like total silence; silence was too loud, so she filled it with background noise as often as possible. The complete silence roused his curiosity enough to get him onto his feet and down the short hall. The living room was dark, the only light coming from the kitchen.
Curious about this change of habit and slightly alarmed after last night’s scare with his car, Wyatt took slow, careful steps toward the kitchen. Paused in the entry and peered inside. Ramie sat at the small table in the one of the chairs that gave him her profile. A bottle of whiskey, a full shot glass, and a single cupcake rested on the table in front of her, all of it untouched, and her head was angled as if staring at the trio of objects.
Did I miss her birthday? Crap.
But if it was her birthday, wouldn’t Brand or one of her other friends have taken her out? Maybe she was the kind of woman who didn’t like to celebrate birthdays after a certain age. Lily liked to say that once she hit twenty-nine, she would forever celebrate the anniversary of that age.
Women made little sense to Wyatt on the best of days.
He shifted his weight, which made a floorboard creak. Ramie looked at him, her eyes wide and startled, as if she’d forgotten she had a roommate. “Hey,” Wyatt said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“It’s okay, I was lost in my own head. It’s your kitchen too.”
“I just, uh, is it your birthday or something? Did I miss the notice?”
“No, it’s not mine.”
Her particular choice of words suggested it was someone’s birthday. Parent? Distant relative she loved and missed? On the occasional night they shared dinner or watched a movie together, they didn’t talk about deeply personal things. They stuck to surface stuff like work, social media, and the weather.
“Do you want me to leave you alone?” Wyatt asked.
“Actually, no. Grab a shot glass, kid.”
Wyatt frowned but did as asked. It no longer irritated him on the rare occasion Jackson let “kid” slip out, but it still did a bit with other people. But Ramie wasn’t being the big sister right now, so he poured himself a shot of the brown liquor and sat across the table from her. “Are we toasting someone?”
“Yep.” She held up her glass, so Wyatt tapped his rim to hers. “To my daughter’s birthday. Cheers.” She tossed back the shot.
He stared at her a beat before knocking his back, too. The strong liquor burned down his throat and into his belly, and he fought back the urge to cough, a tad out of practice with straight shots of booze. “Your daughter?”
She poured herself a second shot. Swiped her finger through the blue icing on her cupcake and licked it off. “Yep. She’ll be thirteen today. Wherever she is.”
“You don’t know where she is?”
“Nope. I gave her up for adoption when she was born. I didn’t want kids before I got pregnant and I don’t want them now, but I couldn’t...” She drank the second shot, her dark eyes gleaming. “So I had her and gave her up. Closed adoption. I don’t think about her a lot, but every year on her birthday I send up a little prayer that whoever adopted her gave her an incredible life.”
