Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Roma was pretty sure she would never fully get used to rummaging through Asha’s belongings, even though Asha had given her full permission.
The truth was, despite her discomfort, she needed to find the paperwork for the cats and the vet clinic that did their quarterly mandatory assessments.
It hadn’t escaped her mind that she was pushing the deadline a bit too much, and she was starting to worry that the strict local laws about cats on the island would require Titan and Nebula to be rehomed on the mainland if their health checks were late.
She still could hardly believe that the island’s local council was actually allowed to enforce such rules.
Asha was a perfectionist and a clean freak in almost every aspect of her life.
Her house had been nearly spotless when Roma arrived—all except for the office.
Her best friend had apologized for its condition, but Roma had brushed it off; everyone deserved a junk drawer, and Asha’s drawer just happened to be a room.
Now that she needed to use it, however, she had to admit that it was a total disaster.
Everything about the office felt like stepping into a different dimension where Asha no longer existed as Roma knew her.
Even the furniture was mismatched, unlike the rest of the house.
While most of the other decor was simple and comfortable, everything in the office was heavy and carved from wood.
The desk had built-in shelving, and she was almost certain that if she cleared it off, there would be a little tab to pull a slatted wooden cover down and close the old-fashioned writing desk.
Asha had provided her with every single detail of the house and the cats’ lives in the huge booklet she had put together, but somehow, it had escaped her to list the veterinary clinic where the two cats were registered.
The emergency vet was listed, but not their regular one.
Roma couldn’t imagine that Asha would risk them not having a trusted vet, almost as much as she doubted that the island’s cat laws would allow an inch of flexibility when it came to registering and tracking the feline population.
Shifting a huge pile of binders and document wallets from the ornate desk to the spare chair next to her, Roma groaned under their weight and momentarily prayed she wasn’t about to slip a disc or pop a hernia.
That was all she needed to push her life from being a little crazy to completely unworkable.
At the back of the desk, sitting perpendicular to the back panel as if it had slipped off the top of the pile of folders and become wedged between its organizational brethren and the wall, was a file box with the words “records and contracts” scrawled in permanent marker across the cover.
“Seriously?” She grabbed the box file and opened it. “How does she do her job when her own record keeping is so?—”
Her words failed her as her eye caught sight of something familiar.
Cynthia’s logo was in the top right-hand corner of a page, sticking out from the stack of papers.
Why would Asha sign a contract with Cynthia Honeywell Consulting? She couldn’t afford their services, and she definitely didn’t need them to find a boyfriend. Then again, she had inexplicably come up with the money to buy the house she was kindly letting Roma live in…
Staring at it, she reasoned with herself. Maybe it wasn’t a contract. Maybe it was a letter or a fundraising appeal. Or…
Nope, she thought as she tugged it out of the pile. Definitely a contract.
It was the initial contract everyone involved with the agency had to sign before moving forward. There was probably Asha’s copy of an NDA floating around somewhere, too, but it didn’t give her any useful information.
Her restraint vanished like smoke in the wind. She sank to the floor cross-legged, flicked through the stack of contracts, and muttered a curse when she only found the NDA. Nothing else.
She looked around to decide which pile to start going through first. Confronted with heaps of unsorted paper, she groaned as she couldn’t ignore the voice of doubt echoing in her mind. She’d never find anything useful in this mess. Instead, she checked her phone.
She tapped on Asha’s contact, thinking it was a totally respectable time for a call.
Was she really just going to ask her outright, though? The phone rang, and her resolve wavered. Her thumb was already moving to hang up the phone when she heard Asha’s voice through the speaker.
“Oh, hey, Ash,” she said. “Sorry to call randomly, but are you at work?”
“Well, yeah, but that’s only because I never stop working,” Asha said with a laugh. “What’s up?”
What was she supposed to say? Roma’s mind went blank.
“Uh…” She stalled, turning to look as a noise behind her hinted that one or both of the cats might be watching her as she sat on the floor and floundered. “The cats.”
“What?”
“No, nothing’s wrong, sorry,” she replied, scolding herself. “I just… I’ve put off their vet check and now I can’t find their vet’s information and?—”
“Do not scare me like that!” Asha exclaimed, causing Roma’s stomach to tighten with guilt. “And it’s the same as the emergency vet. There’s only one clinic that will treat cats. The others didn’t support the move to let them onto the island.”
“Oh….”
Seriously? She could’ve looked that up on the internet! Roma scolded herself.
“Sorry, I just didn’t put two and two together,” she said. “But there is, kind of, one more issue.”
The pause was almost painful, but she wanted to make sure Asha was listening.
“They don’t really like me,” Roma admitted. “And I don’t know if I’ll be able to get them into the cat carriers.”
Another lengthy, painful pause followed, and Roma cringed.
Then Asha laughed. Not a giggle or a snort, but a full-belly laugh that Roma couldn’t help but feel targeted by.
“Hey! Okay, calm down; it’s not that funny.”
“No, no, it is! Babe, you don’t understand,” Asha said through what sounded like tears. “They hate their crates, you really need to read the cat wrangling section again!”
The what?
“There’s a whole bit in there about this, babe. You call the vet, give them the ID numbers, and they’ll see you’re the one with the paranoid cats, and they’ll book you in to get sedatives to put in their food.”
“No, there’s not!” she exclaimed, almost forgetting the real reason she called as she stood and stormed into the living room to grab the guide from the coffee table.
Flipping through it, she landed on a page titled “Guide to Making Roma’s Life Easier,” where the second paragraph bore the heading “drug my cat-children.”
“Are you kidding me?” she asked. How could she have missed this? How could Asha not have included it with the rest of the cat stuff?
By the time Asha stopped laughing and caught her breath, Roma was over feeling stupid about it—the call had been successful in one way or another. And as the pair settled into talking about their usual range of topics, Roma decided she would ask her directly.
“So, I get that it’s beautiful here, but why did you move all the way out here, and to such a…mature community?”
Ask her something directly, at least, if not the actual question.
“Uh, I just needed a change,” she said, sounding distracted. “And you know, I went up there on a business trip and kind of fell in love with the lifestyle. The community wasn’t intentional—just where the house was for sale.”
“Yeah, I remember, sort of. What business was it?”
Asha laughed again. “You know that’s confidential.”
“Sure. Of course, sorry,” Roma said. “So, did you, like, meet anyone here? Is the dating scene manageable, or are they all in their eighties?”
“There are plenty of lovely people. Why? Have you met someone?”
“Uh, no, not really,” she replied. “I’m just not as opposed to the idea of it as I was six months ago. Why? Do you have a secret lead where I could meet my match?”
She was careful about how much emphasis she put on the words. She didn’t want Asha to tell her because she guessed; she wanted Asha to tell her because she wanted to.
“No, sorry,” Asha said. “I really do have to run now, though. Good luck with the vet!”
Just like that, without even saying goodbye, Asha hung up and left Roma on a dead line with her contract in one hand and the “Guide to Making Roma’s Life Easier” in the other.