Chapter 7
“Great, I’ll go get chan—” Dell said, and cut herself off when she remembered what Cole had said about being imprisoned in
her nightie.
Cole pursed his lips, as if he knew she’d be annoyed by a reminder. “How far is it to the lawyer’s office?” he asked.
Dell glanced down at her body. Sure, prancing around her house in her pj’s was one thing, and maybe even going to the park
was fine since she jogged there in spandex every day already, but cruising across town and rolling into the posh law offices
of Brooks, Sterling, and Hoffman in her underthings felt like a step too far.
“Too far to walk barefoot in my jammies,” she said to Cole with a frown. “How are we going to get there?”
“Public transportation is an option.”
Dell scrunched her face in distaste. She didn’t have anything against public transportation in general, but riding it in her current state was not appealing.
“Are there any other methods of transportation for ghosts?” she asked.
“Maybe the rule book says something.” She reached for Cole’s satchel, and he tried to turn away again.
“Yeah, right,” he said with a huff of a laugh. “We are not going to attempt teleportation.”
“Ha!” Dell cheered, hoping he’d fall for her trick. “So, it is possible.” She reached for the bag again, and he shot out a hand to grab her wrist.
A charged moment passed between them. Her skin tingled where he gripped her. His soul-deep eyes narrowed. “Yes, it is possible.
But it will certainly get us in trouble for attempting it.”
She held his gaze with a steely determination. “What do you suggest as an alternative, then, if we are on a time crunch?”
As he stared down at her, she could see in his eyes he was mentally scanning for an answer. When he didn’t come up with one,
he released her arm with a sigh.
Dell victoriously grinned and gestured at the satchel.
He dug his hand in it with a grumble and pulled out the book. She watched him flip to what must have been an index in the
back and then turn a chunk of pages to an earlier section. His eyes darted over the page.
“Ha, there. See?” he said, and whipped it around to show her. “ ‘Postmortem teleportation cannot be conducted without express
written consent from the Afterlife Administration.’ ” He pointed at the words in bold under a longer passage, which surely
described the process.
Dell squinted at the small print and frowned. “Well, you’re an employee of the Afterlife Administration, so grab your pen
and write us some consent. Easy.”
Cole snapped the book shut. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“Why not?”
“It’s above my pay grade,” he said.
“You actually get paid?”
“Yes, it is a job, after all.”
“Huh. Well, I’m more of a beg for forgiveness type of person, especially with my life literally on the line. So I’m fine if we skip the fine print and give it a go anyway.”
She reached for the book still in his hand.
“Ms. Rodgers, please!” he said when she successfully yanked it from him.
She spun away and began flipping pages. She found the correct section and read aloud: “ ‘Successful postmortem intra-dimensional
relocation requires uninterrupted focus on the desired location. If relocation is attempted with more than one individual,
both or all parties must be physically joined.’ ” She stopped reading and looked up at Cole. “So, we basically have to hold
hands and think really hard about where we want to go?”
He wore an exasperated expression. One of nerves, frustration, and, if Dell wasn’t mistaken, a hint of interest. “Sounds like
it, but we can’t—”
Dell reached out and gripped his hand. His warm palm was rigid at first but then cupped around hers like a large glove. The
feeling caught her breath in her throat.
“M-maybe we should hold both hands,” she offered, thrown by how much she liked the feel of his in hers.
He studied her with a curious expression now. Like he was trying to interpret something he didn’t understand but wanted desperately
to figure out. “Good idea.” He said in a trancelike growl.
Dell handed him the book so he could replace it in his satchel. She held out her other hand, and he slid his into it. The feeling of both their palms touching felt intimate on a level Dell couldn’t quite describe. But she liked it.
“Look at you,” she teased. “Breaking the rules.”
He smirked at her, but it was half-hearted. “Okay, if we’re going to do this, where are we going?”
Disbelief that any of this was happening spun around Dell’s head. But it was worth a shot. “The Gorman Building in the Financial
District,” she said. “Just picture a skyscraper, and I’ll do the heavy lifting, since I’ve been there before.”
He nodded. “Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.” Dell closed her eyes and squeezed his hands.
He squeezed back, and she noticed him take a step closer. They were nearly chest to chest, their hands clasped between them.
It felt beyond silly, but Dell pictured the building where she wanted to go: its shape, the street it was on, the front doors.
Slowly, her home’s entryway started disappearing around them. The sharp hook behind her belly button she’d felt when she sat
into Robbie in the park hooked her again, except this time it yanked her forward, as if they were flying down the wormhole
tunnel her entryway had become. In an instant, they were standing on the sidewalk outside the towering building that housed
Brooks, Sterling, and Hoffman.
“We did it!” she exclaimed as she found her footing.
Cole had let go of her hands. She turned to see him doubled over beside her, hands on his knees.
“Oh God, we’re going to get in so much trouble,” he said to the sidewalk.
“You all right?” Dell asked, and gently placed a hand on his back.
He held up one finger and continued taking deep breaths while staring at the ground.
“Can ghosts puke?” Dell asked.
“I didn’t think so until right now,” he said. He took one last deep breath and stood up straight.
Dell grimaced at the queasy look on his face. “Sorry about that. But look! We did it!” she sang, and held out her arms to
the building in front of them.
“Yeah. We did,” Cole said, sounding shocked. And still queasy. He tilted his head up toward the silver-and-glass tower in
front of them.
The gold revolving doors Dell had walked through with Tommy hardly twenty-four hours ago spun with fewer visitors, given it
was Saturday, but the building was still in action.
“Where to?” he asked.
“Twentieth floor.”
“After you,” Cole said with a bow, and gestured toward the doors.
Self-consciousness still thrummed in Dell’s dead body as she moved toward the building. She’d only ever been here in heels
and a skirt, never in a slip of satin with her hair still mussed from bed and whatever teleporting might have done to it.
She ran a hand over her mane to smooth it, right as a woman fitting the building’s dress code pushed through the revolving
door. Her sharp heels snapped off the interior marble and then the sidewalk’s concrete. She carried a designer bag over her
arm and chattered into her phone.
Dell slipped into the door as an opening spun in front of them, and Cole followed right on her heels. She could sense him
there, a warm presence near enough to her back, she could have rested against him with a slight lean.
They stepped into the lobby, a rectangular atrium with banks of elevators on each side and a reception desk in the middle. Two security guards milled about, and a woman sat at reception looking thankful for a slow Saturday afternoon.
But it wasn’t entirely slow. People still came and went from the elevators and crossed the lobby. With twentysomething floors
and a dozen or so businesses housed in its walls, the building never truly slept.
Dell and Cole approached an elevator at the same time as a man dressed down in sweatpants and a tee damp with sweat did. He
too chattered into his phone, much more aggressively than the woman they’d passed outside. Dell and Cole entered with him,
and by a stroke of luck, he pressed the button for the twentieth floor.
“Yeah, well, when the mayor calls, you drop whatever you’re doing, even on a Saturday,” the man said into his phone. He impatiently
jabbed his thumb into the twentieth-floor button again.
Dell sucked in a gasp and gripped Cole’s forearm. “Oh my God,” she whispered as if the man might hear them. “Did you hear
that?” She glanced at the curious look on Cole’s face and then stepped forward to get a better look at the man.
He was middle-aged, with dark hair and sharp eyes. His round face was ruddy and his temple sweaty. She blinked several times
and realized she knew who she was looking at.
She shook Cole’s arm and turned to him. “Cole, this is Mr. Sterling, Tommy’s lawyer. I just didn’t recognize him without a
suit and tie.” She clapped a hand over her mouth as Mr. Sterling kept talking into his phone.
“I don’t know; she didn’t say. Some kind of emergency.
She just said to come down to the office and get her son’s prenup.
They were supposed to sign it yesterday, but the wife never showed.
” He chuckled the sound Dell had heard before in his office.
Something artificially sweetened and not entirely sincere, like a diet soda.
“Cold feet? Maybe, the wedding’s in a week. ”
Dell scrambled to put pieces together in her mind, all the while squeezing Cole’s arm harder and harder. “Okay, so we were
right about the prenup. There must be something important in there. Something Evelyn cares about if she’s calling her lawyer on a Saturday, right after I died. But I guess the good news is, he doesn’t seem
to know I’m dead. If he still thinks the wedding is in a week, she must not have told him.” She looked to Cole with hope in
her eyes.
Cole returned her gaze with a furrowed brow. He nodded like he was following along and then gently gripped her hand with his.
“You are . . . very strong,” he said, and pried it off his arm.
“Sorry,” Dell said, and saw the red indent where she’d been squeezing him.
“But I think you’re right,” Cole said. “We need to see that prenup before he does anything with it.”