Chapter 2
Joss
“You can’t live forever without a phone,” Tilly says from hundreds of miles away, disproving the very point she’s trying to make.
I line up my project in my sewing machine, nudge the thick fold of fabric into the narrow space, and drop the foot. “I’ll get it when I get my car.”
“I just saw Jimmy Dawson yesterday, and he says you haven’t called him to approve repairs yet,” Cora says, ratting me out.
“Well, how can I do that if I don’t have a phone?” Okay, there’s a landline right in the shop. But that even better proves this isn’t urgent.
“You can’t hide forever,” Tilly says more gently.
I gesture to the room around me. They’re not physically with me, but they’re the ones who help me set everything up every time I update equipment. They know what I’m pointing at. “I’m not exactly hiding.”
“Honey, you’ve been hiding for almost a decade,” Cora says. Tilly nods in agreement, and I decide not to argue the point that it’s only been six years.I can’t really say I haven’t been hiding in my own home, either.
This place has a long and colorful history. Despite the farmhouse exterior and the massive barn behind it, the property has never been a farm. The first resident was a blacksmith who gained some notoriety for allegedly supplying bullets and cannons to the wrong side during the Civil War. That ultimately led to his shop getting razed, but the main house survived, only to literally explode half a century later by a drugstore owner who fancied himself a thoroughly educated chemist. He was nothing of the sort and learned the hard way that vinegar and baking soda can make a surprisingly powerful bomb when enough are combined and sealed up tight.
He did not live to share this discovery with the world, but the world at large already knew that.
The house that was built to replace it — the farmhouse with the clapboard siding and the wraparound porch — was initially a bed and breakfast. The owners didn’t make enough money to keep it running, so it bounced from hand to hand, ultimately getting renovated into a veterinary clinic with an apartment upstairs.
When the vet retired, the old animal clinic sat for nearly a decade, the smell too pungent for most. Ultimately, a pediatric oral surgeon spent an obscene amount of money to gut and remodel the downstairs, setting up a quaint practice where he and his pageant queen wife could settle down and build a future together. He planned to only live in the apartment upstairs for a few years, promised his wife that it was temporary, even vowed to rush it once the baby was on the way, although he did set up a nursery for the baby, just in case things didn’t work the way he hoped.
They didn’t.
Because he was a disgusting pervert.
And the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.
“Stop it right now, missy.”
I blink and look back up at the monitor mounted above my Husqvarna domestic. One half of the screen is Tilly Reinhardt, currently in Atlanta, hiding in the dark recesses of the wardrobe of the set she’s been working on for the last month, going absolutely ham on a jar of pickles after having already eaten half a tub of Greek yogurt.Cora Prasad, meanwhile, is all of twelve minutes away from me if she takes the highway, but she’s driving herself crazy putting together twenty-four outfits for a runway for December. I’m going live in an hour to demonstrate this modern cathedral window quilt technique that I’ve been partially assembling units for.
This works. We live in the time of virtual meetings. We got this.
Up in the corner are two smaller video feeds. One shows my fingers guiding my fabric under the presser foot, the needle rhythmically punching through at sixteenth-inch increments along the edge of the folded-over fabric. The other miniature video is of my face, the scowl on it the one Cora and Tilly refer to as The Ex.
Ex human, unfortunately. The jackass didn’t give me a chance to divorce him before he exed himself from life. The only good thing he did for me was gifting me the house when he initially bought it. I thought it was a grand gesture, a wedding gift. Ended up being the only thing I had left after the lawsuits from his victims were wrapped up.
But I digress.
I give myself a full upper-body shake that fluffs up my blonde ponytail and pinks up my pale cheeks. With a dazzling smile, I’m myself again.
Tilly says, “Ulk, that’s just as bad,” through pickle-stuffed cheeks. “Just be you.”
My smile droops only a notch as I say, “But this is me.” I’ve been besties with Tilly for five years, but I had already recreated myself at that point, first as Cora’s pattern drafter and then in the quilting field when I realized this was where my passion truly lay. Tilly thinks I’m always giving pageant energy to hide some ‘true’ self deep inside.
I’m not. It’s been a decade since I last competed, but I spent almost twenty years on that stage. My first time, I had to hold my mother’s hand because I hadn’t mastered walking yet. And I get how cheesy it was. I get why the industry gets such a bad rap. There really weren’t too many toxic moms and even fewer toxic girls, but the bad apples did spoil the bunch. Still, I loved it.
Every time I proudly saidworld peace,I meant it.
“Don’t you do it!” Tilly suddenly screeches. “If you leak a single tear, I’ll be bawling like a baby. Again. Pregnancy hormones suck.”
“I wasn’t going to cry,” I say quickly, even though yeah, it takes hardly anything to get the waterworks going.
“You think because your eyes are blue, we can’t see the water pooling?” Tilly snaps.
“Play nice,” Cora says.
I can see the fight in Tilly’s eyes, but she chomps down on her pickle instead. “Sorry, I just need to get laid. We all need to get laid.”
“You got laid five weeks ago, and look what happened,” Cora jokes.
“Well, you two need to get laid.”
I don’t. I really, truly don’t. I’ve had three boyfriends since my nightmare of a husband took his trash self out, and they were three too many. I’m done. I roll myself away from my workbench and pick up the two Cathedral Window lap quilts I squared up yesterday. “Kona Mermaid Shores or Island Batiks Hocus Pocus for my display style?”
Cora says, “Mermaid,” and Tilly says, “Hocus Pocus.”
The debate explodes immediately. Tilly loves anything Halloween, and I’ve fussy-cut the Hocus Pocus fabrics so the Cathedral Window diamonds each have a featured Halloween element while the leaves are soft patterns in the traditional purple, green, and orange palette. Cora’s more of a solids girl, especially when an ombre effect can be pulled off. I’ve already tested both samples and found they film well, and they both clearly show the elements of the pattern. In my mind, they’re equal.
Well, not exactly. While Cora and Tilly bicker, I thread a needle with black and settle back in my seat to whip-stitch the backside of the binding down on the Hocus Pocus. Sorry, Cora, but this is a livestream for my subscribers, and we’re in Halloween craft season.
“Natalie, you back here? We got an emergency!” a masculine voice can be heard yelling faintly in Tilly’s feed.
She rolls her eyes and stuffs one last pickle in her mouth before screwing the jar shut. She calls out that she’ll be there in a minute as she does a quick reset of her orange hair.
Neon orange, not redhead orange. With black roots. ‘Tis the season, and all that.
“He was such a bang until he started calling meNatalie, and now he’s a total kill,” she mutters as she reaches for her phone to end the feed. “See you bitches later!”
The screen drops before I can say anything to her. “I’m sorry, is she about to go kill that guy?” I ask Cora.
Cora snorts. Now that the screen isn’t being shared and I can see the full width of her camera frame, her current project is visible. Once upon a time, it would have been an avant-garde asymmetric gown with some trick to it to wow the photogs at the Met Gala. Today’s ensemble is a three-piece women’s business suit that’s formal enough for a lawyer to wear to court but fashionable and trendy enough to stop for drinks at a high-end bar after the trial. This must be the line she’s doing for Neiman Marcus. It’s nearly done, with completed pants and shirt. The jacket is assembled but unlined, and Cora is fussing with the fit. “You know, the Bang, Marry, Kill game.”
Reaching the end of my sample, I ease the fabric out of the machine. “The what?”
“Oh come on, we’ve definitely played this before. Where you’re given a list of three people and you decide who you’d bang, who you’d marry, and who you’d kill?”
I gasp. “Why would you kill one of them?”
“I don’t know, that’s just the game. Gotta kill one.”
“Wait, which am I?”
“What?”
“Am I the bang, the marry, or the kill?”
“No, it doesn’t work like that.”
“Well, there’s three of us: you, me, and Tilly. So—”
“Erm, Joss?” Cora says, her eyes trained just below the camera, meaning she’s looking at me.
But I’m not done. She’s talking like this is a well-known thing that she and Tilly do often, but I’veneverheard of it before, which means they have a fun thing they do that I’ve been excluded from. Or, I guess fun, but how awful does this sound? Bang, Marry, or Kill? What kind of options are those? Can you not be friends with someone? Or just not have a relationship at all? What if they’re already married, or if they don’t want to marry you? “So one of us has to be banged, and one married—”
“Right, but behind you. There’s a giant—”
“—and one killed, so what am I?” I finish before what she’s saying hits my brain.
“Marry, definitely,” a deep, gravelly voice says from behind me.
I spin around and let out a yelp at the sight of the red-haired, hazel-eyed giant.