Chapter 65
SOPHIE
I felt Nicholas’s mind racing as he lay beside me, unable to sleep. Poor guy. He’d tried so hard, for so long, to stay out of the Marigold Cottages drama. For years, he’d barely spoken to anyone on the property. Yet look at him now. Living with me and deeply entangled with everyone else.
He was probably obsessing about the murders.
I didn’t know what to make of this second one, Sunny Wheeler’s stabbing, but my playwright senses were still tingling about Frank DeYoung’s death.
My mind’s eye kept zooming in on details nobody else seemed to notice.
The ice cubes, for example. They changed everything. Somehow.
Well, say the killer planted ice at the top of the stairs, knowing that’s where Frank lingered while saying goodbye? In that case, they wouldn’t need to be present when he fell, widening the field of suspects!
I almost shared that with Nicholas, but kept quiet when I heard his unhappy sigh.
On second thought, he probably wasn’t obsessing about the murders. He was probably worrying about the other residents. And about Mrs. B. He considered her family. We all did, but his relationship with her was deeper. If Ocean was her daughter, Nicholas was her son.
“We’ll figure it out,” I murmured, in the dim light of the bedroom.
“There’s just so much to lose,” he said.
I knew what he meant. I wanted to cry at the thought of Marigold Cottages breaking apart, of the community fracturing and fading. Of losing these connections. I hated the chance that he’d lose the property, too. I treasured the weird, beautiful home we’d made together, and I felt it slipping away.