CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It is a beautiful day in Londontown, and I am outside jogging, and all is right and all is fine because I do not have a crush on Grant and that is why I am going for a normal jog, jogging normally.
That night in the park, the one I have barely even thought about in the three days and eleven hours since?
That was just a weird little twinge brought on by weird little moments of vulnerability that will not happen again.
Now everything’s back to normal. And I do not have a crush on Grant.
And I know that because of how normally I am jogging.
I pass a bus, parked in the middle of the street. Odd. Then I realize it’s not parked, it’s driving at a normal speed and I am, in fact, outrunning it.
I stumble to a stop, only now realizing how my lungs are trying to incinerate me from the inside out. Fuck. This isn’t working.
I lean against a brick building in the shade, the wall cool at my back. In the stillness of the moment, with nothing but my gasping breath and my thumping heartbeat to fill the quiet, the lie crumbles like a sandcastle.
I have a stupid fucking crush on Grant.
This can’t happen. As a rule, I do not let this happen.
A little vacation flirtation is all well and good, but feelings?
Real feelings, and for someone who lives in the same city as me, assuming we ever make it back there?
They might be rejected, or worse, reciprocated.
And reciprocated feelings have a way of turning into relationships.
And relationships have a way of crushing people’s hearts and ruining their lives.
Which is why normally, I’m very good at keeping my heart out of things. But Grant crept up on me. He caught me with my guard down, tricked me into getting to know him and like him before I could realize that there might be something brewing between us.
And the worst part is that I can’t just run away.
We’re stuck together with life-and-death stakes, and the attraction is only going to get worse.
We still have to train every day. We’ve worked through most of the basic defenses, so now each morning I’m left scrambling for things to teach him that don’t involve close bodily contact.
I’ve spent two entire days teaching him how to kick a weapon out of someone’s hand, which is almost never the answer.
We’ve devoted hours to vague no-touching concepts like using whatever you have available and maintaining the element of surprise and definitely not things like trying to escape being pinned to the ground until you realize it has become A Moment and all of a sudden you’re kissing.
And then there’s Lissa and her hawklike gaze and her waggly eyebrows whenever Grant and I so much as glance in each other’s direction.
I compose a text to Steph—HELP, I have a crush—and then delete it because I know what she’s going to say. Something along the lines of Shall I read from Corinthians or Breaking Dawn at your wedding?
I breathe forcefully, in the nose and out the mouth.
It’s going to be fine, I decide. It is fine, because I’m an adult with self-control.
So what if I have a tiny, one-sided crush?
I don’t have to tell anyone. I can even talk myself out of it.
Grant is just the buddy in the accidental buddy-cop story.
Or buddy-crime-vigilante, as it were. I like him in a camaraderie sort of way, as a survival instinct more than anything else.
That’s all this is. I repeat it to myself like a mantra. That’s all this is.
I continue my leisurely jog—leisurely, leisurely, LEISURELY, I warn myself in my head—and focus on all the reasons not to have feelings for Grant.
He’s a know-it-all. He’s judgy. He’s so anxious all the time.
I can see it in the way he rubs his jaw, the way his hands shake just a little when he’s particularly nervous.
But he tries anyway. He’s always trying.
And he gets such a determined look in his eye, even when he’s freaking out, because he’s decided to work with me and be there by my side.
I couldn’t ask for a better teammate in all of this, nor one who makes me feel so bathed in sunlight whenever he cracks a reluctant smile. Okay, cool. This isn’t working either.
I run until I come to a cemetery. I don’t know if it’s in poor taste to jog through a cemetery, but maybe pondering mortality and being among the wisdom of the passed-on will give me a nice little reprieve.
I’m feeling very irritated at all the dead people and how unhelpful they are when finally, I see something that does pull me from the whirlpool in my brain. Seated on a blanket in front of a small gravestone, with a book in his hand and a leather weekender bag by his side, is Lesley.
He sets his book down in surprise as I make my way toward him.
“Well, fancy seeing you here,” he says.
“Just out for a little jog,” I say, wheezing.
Lesley raises his eyebrows. “All the way out here? We’re at least ten miles from the house.”
Jesus. Ten miles?
“I just … needed to clear my head a little.”
He scoots over and pats the blanket next to him, and I collapse onto it.
“What are you doing here?” I ask him.
He thumbs through his book. “I always used to read to my sister. Never saw a reason to stop. Oh, sorry—” He lowers the book, gesturing back and forth from me to the tombstone. “Roxie, Agnes. Agnes, Roxie.”
“Nice to … meet you,” I say awkwardly to the stone.
“She can’t hear you,” he says, licking a fingertip to turn a page. “She’s dead.”
He begins to read aloud, a chapter from a cozy mystery about a Welsh schoolteacher turned detective. Initially it feels like I’m intruding on something sacred. But as Lesley continues telling the story, doing the voices and everything, I feel honored to witness this little ritual.
Eventually, he comes to the cliffhanger at chapter’s end and tucks a worn bookmark between the pages. “To be continued,” he says toward Agnes’s stone, giving it a pat.
Her grave marker is small and unassuming, bearing only the words IN LOVING MEMORY OF AGNES MARY BURNS—MAY 6, 1952–OCTOBER 23, 1960. She was only eight. Most of the stones around us have fallen into illegible disrepair, dappled with moss and mildew, but Agnes’s is clean and well kept.
Lesley’s been a vivid presence since we met, but this moment adds some shading to my image of him.
In his flurry of coming and going, his workshops and clue-hunting and any incognito street art sessions he may or may not have undertaken, I wonder how often he’s quietly slipped away to read to Agnes.
“She’d have been a proper investigator one day,” Lesley says, pulling me from my thoughts.
“We solved mysteries as kids, you know. Who ate the last biscuit, who broke the window, that sort of thing. We called ourselves Detective Higgins and Detective Wiggins. I’d eventually get bored and arrest our dog for the crime, but Aggie was relentless.
She’d go stomping down the road, questioning every last neighbor.
She once interrogated the postman until he cried.
” He chuckles at the memory. “I could never figure out how such a small person could hold such a big spark. Lissa reminds me of her in that way.”
“What happened?” I ask quietly, hoping I’m not crossing a line.
He brushes some dirt from Agnes’s stone. “Cancer,” he says. “Cruelest killer I ever met. No mercy. Not even a motive.” He sighs. “Me, I grew up and made loads of money and got bored living the dream. So I figured I may as well try to live hers for her.”
I feel an ache as it sinks in, what Lesley really wants from this crime-solving business.
Not revenge or glory; just closeness with someone he loved and lost. He doesn’t want to close the book on their childhood and the life she should have led, no matter how many years it’s been.
He may be a bit bumbling as detectives go, but I can’t help but feel Agnes would be proud all the same.
It occurs to me then that Agnes never actually existed.
That even Lesley, sitting in front of me with a book cradled in his sunspotted hands, the soft crinkles of his eyes peeking out from behind his glasses, doesn’t exist. Not really.
And I hate that thought, so I dismiss it.
What is reality, anyway? Lesley and I might not occupy the same one—but for now, I’m glad to be living in his.
While we’re sharing, I hazard another question: “What’s the deal with Wally?”
Lesley scrunches his nose with distaste. “He’d like to forget that we were a team once. Like partners, except that one of us was a copper and the other would never dream of being so dull. It was all very hush-hush, of course. I’m not always strictly aboveboard with my operations.”
“You don’t say.”
He chuckles. “My methods were all very well and good when they benefited him. Then there’s a little hiccup in pursuit of a suspect, and all of a sudden I’m a liability and an impediment to justice.” He rolls his eyes. “Honestly, you crash one police car. It isn’t like they don’t have more.”
He dismisses the memory with the wave of a hand.
“Anyway, it was for the best. I went my own way, hired Lissa, and here we are. Turns out, I’m better off without Wally slowing me down.
Take the Facebook group, for instance: I found it after some idiot killer dropped his phone at the crime scene.
You call it tampering with evidence; I call it the motherlode.
If Wally had found it, it’d be wrapped up in plastic and red tape, left to fester in police storage. ”
He clicks his tongue, shaking his head at the pity of it all. “I guarantee, if you and Grant hadn’t tipped him off, he’d never have gotten the Takeawayer. He’d just be going in his usual circles, catching no one and threatening to arrest me for interference.”
“Why doesn’t he?” I ask. “It seems like he has grounds, no offense.”
He scoffs. “Please. He owes me too much. And he’d never risk revealing the secret behind his former success. Now he’d rather fail alone than succeed with my help. It’s like he doesn’t even want the crimes solved.”
I think back to meeting Wally—how he seemed particularly furious, for someone who had just been handed a major lead in his investigation. How he silenced Howard right as he was about to clue us in on Mr. Page.
Lesley gives his legs a hearty slap and turns to me, brightening. “No matter. Water under the bridge. Who needs a washed-up cop when you’ve got the dream team of killer catchers?”
“We’ve caught you zero killers so far,” I point out.
“We’re doing a bang-up job, all things considered,” he says. “One of these days, we’ll hand-deliver Mr. Page to Wally and he’ll realize how much he mucked this all up.”
I feel a swell of pride for our little troop. Fake or not, it feels good to be part of something, and to help Lesley in his quest for redemption.
He gestures to me with a lift of his chin. “Now your turn, Dwayne ‘The Rox’ Johnson. What’s on your mind?”
“Oh.” It’s been nice having a break from my own problems. And now it’s over. “It’s stupid.”
“Sure,” Lesley says. “So stupid that you ran ten miles to escape it.”
There’s a little something in his eyes, in the way he tilts his head, that makes me wonder if he knows more than he lets on.
But if he does, he’s content to keep it that way.
After a quiet moment, he stands from the blanket and shakes out his stiff knee.
“Got to get a bench in here,” he says with a groan.
“I love a good bench.” He brushes himself off, then helps me up.
I pick up the blanket and help him fold it. “I won’t pry,” he says as we bring the corners together. “But I do have advice for dealing with those things that make you want to run away.”
“And what’s that?”
He peers at me, a sliver of blue-gray eyes glinting over his glasses.
“Try not running and see what happens.”
Lesley flags me a cab when we get back to the street. He’s off to a cold case convention in Birmingham until tomorrow afternoon, unless any excitement calls him back earlier, and assures me that Lissa will hold down the fort until then.
I watch him stride off toward the Tube station with his bag in tow, the book and blanket still tucked under his arm.
He’s not real, I remind myself. But as my cab drives away and he fades into the stream of passersby, there’s warmth in my chest—and a tiny new pang as I wonder how long until he disappears entirely.
· · ·
I HAVEN’T EVEN closed the front door before Lissa pounces, giving me whiplash as she reels me by the elbow into Lesley’s study.
“Perfect timing!” she chirps, then turns to bellow, “GRANT! STUDY!”
A quick pulse of panic shoots through me as he comes trundling down the stairs, his face lined with an apprehension that eases up a little when he sees me.
“Hey,” he says, landing at the foot of the stairs. He smiles—just a small one, but sincere. It turns my heart into one of those emojis with hearts for eyes, which is too many hearts for one heart.
“Hi.” Aiming for very very casual, I overshoot and punch him in the shoulder. He frowns and rubs the spot. “Sorry,” I say. “Workout adrenaline.”
We settle onto the couch opposite Lissa—Grant in a normal spot, me so far to the other end that I might get stuck between the cushion and armrest. Lissa’s perched on the edge of her seat, drumming her lilac-manicured hands over her knees.
She looks like she’s about to explode into a burst of confetti.
“I take it there’s a new assignment?” says Grant.
“There iiiiis!” she sings. Being peppy is nothing new for Lissa, but this is different. It’s like she body-swapped with a hummingbird fed on Pop Rocks. I can already see Anna’s editor writing tone it down all over her.
I gesture for Lissa to cut to the chase. “And it is …?”
Biting back a grin, she lets out a little squeak, green eyes flashing between me and Grant. She takes a calming breath in and out and does her very best to deliver the rest with a straight face.
“At a romantic bed and breakfast in the Cotswolds, this weekend!”