12. Evie
EVIE
Hazel gets a promotion on a Tuesday. By Friday, she’s thrown herself a party. Of course she has.
There’s a bartender shaking cocktails in the kitchen, candles on every surface, little folded cards in front of each dish explaining what it is. I’m standing beside a bowl labeled whipped feta, hot honey, thyme, wearing a Sex Pistols T-shirt, feeling like a smudge on an otherwise clean photo.
Tomás aside, I’ve barely spent time this month with anyone under fifty. My world has shrunk to funeral homes, grocery runs, PT appointments, and Murphy’s living room. I’d forgotten what a room full of laughing twenty-somethings even sounds like.
“You made it.” Hazel materializes with two glasses of something fruity and presses one into my hand. She’s in a lavender slip dress, hair pinned up neatly. “I was worried you’d bail for a last-minute work thing.”
“It’s Friday night, baby. The dead can wait.” I clink my glass to hers. “Congratulations, Counselor. Or is it partner now? Do I have to bow?”
“A small curtsy wouldn’t kill you.” She surveys her own party, openly pleased with it. “Junior partner. There’s a whole tier system—it’s very boring, but my name goes on something now. A letterhead. A door, eventually.”
“Your name on a door.” I shake my head. “You’ve wanted that since we were seventeen and you made me proofread that obnoxious personal statement.”
“That was a good essay!”
“You compared the legal system to a Fleetwood Mac song.”
“And I got in.”
I’m still laughing when she drifts off to accept congratulations from someone in a tailored blazer, already on to the next.
That’s Hazel. She decided as a teenager exactly what she wanted and walked at it in a straight line for eight years. I’ve never once been jealous of her for it. I’ve just never understood how a person gets that certain about anything.
I take a slow lap around the apartment, accepting tiny foods off passing trays and pretending to know the difference between expensive whiskey and the regular kind. Thirty minutes in, a tall guy finds me over by the whipped feta.
He’s blond, wearing a pale linen shirt and expensive leather shoes.
“Can I save you from pretending to read the ingredient cards?”
“I was actually invested,” I reply. “Riveting stuff. Did you know this one has three kinds of thyme in it?”
He wrinkles his nose. “That’s two kinds too many.”
“Finally, a man of conviction.”
He settles in to me and offers a hand. Grant, apparently—a litigator who works at Hazel’s firm. He’s easy enough to talk to, and he actually looks me in the eyes while I speak.
“So, what do you do?”
“Well, the dream was the arts.” I scoop a generous helping of whipped feta onto a cracker. “Now I mostly just bury people.”
His eyebrows climb toward his hairline. “Literally?”
“Yeah. I handle death care at my father’s funeral home.”
“Huh. So you’re the person to talk to if one needs to hide a body, then.”
I mime a sharp gasp. “I’d never admit to a crime in front of a lawyer.”
He snorts, and I feel myself relax another notch.
He’s funny. He’s charming. It’s a genuinely pleasant evening, which is why the sudden urge to check my phone beneath the counter—just as he takes a bite of his cracker—is so frustratingly persistent.
The screen is empty. It’s nine o’clock in Vegas, midnight in Charlotte, and with a game on the calendar for tomorrow, Briggs is likely already powered down. I shove the phone back into my pocket.
“Boyfriend?” Grant asks, his expression tilting with perception. When I look up, startled, he nods toward my hand. “The phone.”
“Work,” I lie.
“Demanding boss, then?”
“Extremely. He’s elderly, opinionated, and has a penchant for firing people via Post-it notes stuck to their windshields.”
“Sounds like a nightmare.”
“He’s the best man I’ve met all year.”
Grant grins, and we drift deeper into the party. Somewhere across the room, Hazel unleashes her genuine laugh—the loud, ungraceful honk that’s been her signature since middle school, audible from any corner of the apartment.
The sound makes my own smile widen.
“Tell me, Counselor,” I say, “was the law always the goal, or were you just a kid who liked to win a fight?”
“A bit of both. I was an exceptionally irritating child.” He admits it with a careless shrug. “You ever have the pleasure of giving a deposition?”
“I’ve managed to avoid that specific circle of hell so far.”
“A few weeks back, I sat through forty-five minutes of opposing counsel trying to argue that my client’s Jet Ski possessed ‘emotional significance.’”
I scrunch my nose. “How do you even quantify that?”
“Apparently, he wept for three hours when it hit the lake floor. Or so the testimony goes.”
“That’s a hell of a bond to form with a machine.”
“It was a thirty-thousand-dollar bond.”
“Let me guess—was he drinking when the ship went down?”
“Does a Vegas summer inevitably try to kill you?”
Briggs would have a field day with that one. No one hates this town more than he does.
I set the thought down as gently as possible.
“You went somewhere just now,” Grant says, watching me closely.
I offer a small, performative smile. “I’m right here.”
He tilts his head. “I’ve had the feeling for the last twenty minutes that I’m having a wonderful time and you’re just doing an impression of someone who is.”
“I’m just spacey,” I murmur. “You’re a catch, Grant. Genuinely.”
He huffs a laugh, finishes his drink, and has the grace not to push. It’s the most attractive thing he’s done all night.
“Tell you what.” He pulls a pen from a pocket and grabs one of the ingredient cards. “I’ll give you my number. Hazel’s got a birthday in March, so our orbits will cross again. You might feel like using it by then.”
I take the card without offering the truth, which is that I already know I won’t.
Hazel is by the window when I find her, flushed and glittering, holding court over a cluster of strangers.
“Met your friend Grant,” I say. “He asked if I was a murderer.”
“Grant’s cute,” she says, singsongy and ignoring my tone. “Grant’s available. Grant bills six hundred an hour and owns his own—”
“Grant’s lovely.”
“But.” She narrows her eyes. “There’s a but?”
My only real objection is that somewhere between arguing about mufflers and watching hockey with his father, I’ve gone and developed a little thing for Briggs. Hazel knows I’ve been working for a famous athlete’s family. She doesn’t know we text every single day now.
That part feels like a secret worth keeping a little longer.
“I’m just tired,” I say, deflecting again. “It’s been a long month.”
“Then go home, you little weirdo. You don’t have to stay if you’re not feeling it. I won’t be offended.”
I pout. “Promise?”
She offers the two-finger salute. “Scout’s honor.”
“Okay. Congratulations, junior partner. I’ll see you at Cherry on Sunday?”
“See you then.”
I hug her goodbye and slip out. The December air hits all at once, cool enough that I zip my jacket while crossing to the car.
I make it about four blocks before the noise starts. It’s not the familiar muffler rattle; it’s a high, grinding whine under the hood that rises with the accelerator and drops when I let off.
I pull into a dark tire shop lot, put it in park, and let it idle. Eventually, the whine settles into a rattle.
What the hell? This car got a full tune-up six weeks ago—the one Briggs insisted on as a condition of employment so it wouldn’t die with his father in the passenger seat.
I text him, because he made it his business. And because it’s technically his money currently rattling itself apart under this hood.
Evie
your investment is making a strange noise
[voice memo, 0:09]
I hold the phone to the vent and record the whine as evidence. I don’t expect a reply before morning, given the hour where he is, but the phone rings in my hand with a FaceTime request I scramble to answer.
When Briggs appears, he’s propped against his headboard, shirtless. The dahlia climbs his neck just like I remember, but without the shirt, I finally see where it leads—across his shoulder and down into a scatter of black ink over his chest.
There are others, too. Ink across one rib, something wrapping his left forearm. Hockey has carved the rest of him into hard lines and old scars. He is, as expected, sculpted out of fucking marble.
“That’s not the muffler,” he says.
“Hi to you, too.” I give myself exactly ten seconds to appreciate the view. “It’s a new noise. It’s been very loyal to the muffler until tonight, so this feels like a betrayal.”
“Play it again.”
I hold the phone to the vent. The whine obliges.
When I flip back, he’s frowning at something off camera, thinking, and I get a clean look at him for the first time since he left. The heavy brows, the mustache. A pillow crease on his cheek, his hair a mess, and none of it helps.
If anything, it’s worse. The polished version I could brace for. This is just a half-naked man alone in his bed.
“Yeah, that doesn’t sound good.”
“No shit.”
There’s something resting against his knee. His right hand. The knuckles are a mess—split across two of them, one scabbed dark, the whole thing still visibly swollen.
I saw the fight. I watched it from Murphy’s couch, watched him drop a man and get hauled off with the ref’s arm raised. Then I watched Murphy go so quiet it scared me worse than the hit had.
We haven’t breathed a word of it to each other. He texted me the next morning like it never happened, and I let him, because I didn’t know how to ask.
“That’s a belt, probably,” he says. “Or the alternator is finally quitting. Don’t drive it more than you have to. I’ll call the shop tomorrow—”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Evie.”
“You already paid for it once.” It comes out sharp, sharper than I meant. I soften the blow. “I’ll take it in. I have money now. Some man overpays me to watch hockey and argue about produce with his father.”
Something shifts in his expression. His eyes catch mine catching his hand, and he tries to move it out of the frame. I don’t let him.
“Speaking of bad,” I say. “That looks it.”
“It’s fine.”
“You dropped a man on national television. I saw it. I’ve been waiting for you to bring it up, and you sent me a picture of Augie eating a sock instead.”
“He found a bruise and pressed it. I retaliated.”
“So what did the guy say to you?”
I’ve watched enough of his games now. I know what he looks like when he plays angry and when he plays clean. That was something else entirely.
“He said Ziggy and I weren’t speaking. When he died.” The words come out flat, sanded down to the bone. “I don’t know how he knew. It’s true, though. Pissed me off that he said it out loud. So I hit him until it wasn’t the only thing in my head anymore.”
I don’t offer an apology. I’ve learned that much—sorry is a door he closes. And I don’t tell him it wasn’t his fault, because I don’t know that, and he’d hear the lie.
“Did it work?” I ask.
It surprises a laugh out of him, small and broken. “For about ninety seconds.”
“You can do better than that.”
“Yeah.” He drags a hand down his face. “You’re not going to ask me why?”
“Why what?”
“Why Zig and I weren’t on speaking terms when he passed.”
I shift in the seat, the car ticking as it cools. “Do you want me to ask you?”
He looks at me through the screen for a long moment. It’s different than a text, worse and better both. There are no typing dots to hide behind, but now I can’t stop memorizing the shape of his mouth as he speaks.
“I’m coming home for Christmas,” he says. “Maybe we can talk about it then. In person.”
My stomach flutters. “Your dad will be so happy.”
“I’ll be in Vegas the twenty-fourth through the twenty-sixth. League break. You’ll be around?”
I could take the holiday off, especially if he’s there. I should take it.
“I’ll stop by the house on Christmas Eve. I can bring a pie.”
He frowns. “I’m still holding a grudge about the bourbon pecan, by the way.”
“Oh, don’t worry. My pie is leagues better than that.”
The corner of his mouth lifts. “Is it now?”
“Absolutely.”
“Get the car looked at, Evie. And no driving up any hills in the meantime.”
“Yes, sir.”
He chuckles low before the connection cuts.
I sit in the idling car in the empty lot with my face flaming hot. I think I’ve been safe this whole time because he’s been two time zones away. It’s easy to talk to him over a screen. Easy to taunt him and hide when one of us says something that lands too close to the bone.
But he’s going to be in the same room as me now.
What if it’s unbearably awkward?
Worse, what if it isn’t?