Chapter 10
Nothing happened.
Dell peeled her eyes open, expecting to now be staring at the ceiling from her position in the hospital bed, but instead,
she was still standing in the corner of her crowded room, facing the transition specialist who’d put this whole journey in
motion.
“What happened?” she said curtly to Cole. “Why didn’t that work?”
“Um . . . I—I’m not sure,” Cole stammered.
They didn’t have much time to figure it out before commotion overtook the room.
“Bill! Get in here!” Dell’s mother shouted toward the doorway. “Get a nurse! She moved!” She hovered over Dell’s body, squeezing
her hand and petting her hair with a hopeful plea in her eye.
Dell’s father came skidding around the corner, clearly having run. “What happened?” He still had his phone clutched in his
hand.
“She moved,” Patricia repeated. “We need a nurse.”
“I’ll call you back,” William said into his phone, and then shoved it in his pocket. He rounded the bed to Dell’s other side.
“What did he say?” Patricia asked, and nodded at his pocket where he’d stuck the phone.
“Who? Oh, Perry. He said he’s already in contact with the police. The Morattos won’t see another day in office.” He leaned
over Dell’s body and took her other hand.
“Good,” Patricia seethed.
“I always knew, deep down, he wasn’t right for me,” Dell said, and pressed her palms to her face. “But all I saw was another
achievement checked off: marry someone powerful. Maintain the family legacy.”
Cole’s warm hand landed on her shoulder. “You couldn’t have known it went this deep though.”
Dell lifted her face from her palms and met his eyes. She was hit with another vision. This one of Cole by the fireplace again,
except now more of the room was included. She was sitting beside him, near a window, and outside was . . . snow?
She shook herself from it right as a nurse came rushing into the room. “Immediate family only, please. We need room.” She
shooed everyone away while Dell’s doctor swept in through the door. Caught up in the commotion, Dell and Cole ended up in
the hallway, along with everyone else who’d been moved out of the way.
For a moment, Dell’s dead chest lifted with hope that the medical team could actually accomplish something in their effort
to save her. But she knew, based on the fact she was still very much stuck in her invisible ghost body, they would not.
“Now what?” she said to Cole with a defeated flop of her hands against her thighs.
When he didn’t immediately have an answer, she gazed around at the company they stood among: Mariana chewing her lip and trying
to get a peek in the door; Lena worriedly kissing her daughter’s cheek and bouncing her on her hip; Oscar running a hand over
his thick hair and sighing.
At the sight of Oscar she wondered, fleetingly, if perhaps her lesson had to do with her restaurant. Although she couldn’t imagine what could possibly be waiting for her there if finding out her
fiancé planning to murder her wasn’t the thing that was supposed to set her life back on course.
But it was worth a shot.
She pivoted to face Cole. “I want to go to my restaurant.”
The look on his face said he expected such a request to be coming, but a trepidation dampened it. His lips parted, but nothing
came out.
“What?” Dell said.
“What, what?” he asked.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “You were about to say something.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“You are not a good liar. What was it?”
He caught the edge of a breath, and then sighed. “I was going to suggest maybe we should slow down a little bit. We’ve been
running around all day, trying to fix things, and maybe a pause would help clarify.”
Dell’s face bent into a frown. “Clarify what? If solving the Tommy mystery didn’t reunite me with my body, we’ve got to keep looking for what will.
” She held her arm out toward her room’s doorway.
“My family may be powerful, but there’s only so long we can stall when our only hope is my body occasionally flopping like a fish. ”
Cole threw a glance at the doorway and twisted his lips. He sighed and held out his hand. “Address?” he asked in a tone of
defeat.
“Thank you,” Dell said, and linked her hand with his. She told him the address and prepared as much as one could prepare to
be sucked through an inexplicable portal.
They landed outside Pergo’s front doors on the sidewalk. The street behind them hummed with the usual traffic. Dell was surprised
not to see a mob of reporters trying to push their way in. Instead, it was a handful of classily dressed guests showing up
for their dinner reservations.
“I’m not about to whack my face on this door, am I?” she asked Cole. “This place is mine.”
“Should be safe for entry,” he said with a nod.
“Good.” Still, she stuck out her arm slowly, as if she were reaching into a cave and didn’t know what might be lurking inside.
When her hand and wrist passed through, she followed with the rest of her body.
Inside, the air was lively but dulled. Every table was taken, with servers weaving in between them like a choreographed dance,
trays balanced on fingertips. Dell could hear the kitchen buzzing with activity, but even that sounded muted. Jason wasn’t
at the host podium at the moment, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t around.
“What do you expect to find here?” Cole asked as he followed her across the dining room toward the swinging door leading to the kitchen.
“I have no idea. If the murder conspiracy wasn’t enough of a lesson to bring me back, I can’t imagine finding out someone
is swiping bottles of booze or swapping to nonorganic ingredients is going to do it either, not that my staff would ever do
either of those things.”
“Well, you also didn’t expect your fiancé to be so devious either,” he muttered.
Dell shot him a look, not wanting to admit he made a great point. What else had she missed right under her nose?
They passed through into the kitchen, and the smell of prep hit Dell’s dulled senses: fresh herbs, mirepoix, a dash of citrus.
Her staff manned their stations, all chopping and slicing and stewing, but with somber faces and low murmurs, rather than
the usual lively chaos. Surely, they’d heard the news. Oscar must have told them to come in and keep the show running anyway.
Good, Dell thought. People still needed to eat, even if she wasn’t there.
“Well, at least they aren’t celebrating my death,” she said flatly.
“I wouldn’t expect anyone to celebrate your death,” Cole said. “Well, other than the obvious, but we’ve already cleared that
up.”
“I’m not entirely sure that made me feel better, but thank you.”
Cole made an exasperated sound. “Sorry. I just meant you are a wonderful person, as far as I can tell. No one would be happy
to lose you from their life.”
Dell looked up at him in time to see a tender warmth filling his eyes.
Again, a vision swam through her mind. This time, they were outside, and something was blurring her sight.
It cleared when Cole pinched a snowflake off her eyelash and smiled warmly at her.
He wore a beanie and a scarf. The tip of his nose was pink from the cold.
More snow was falling around them. Dell swatted at it on reflex.
“What are you doing?” Cole said, pulling her back to the present where they stood in her kitchen. He leaned back from her
swat.
Dell didn’t know what to make of the things she kept seeing, so she reached for a lie. “Oh, there was a, um, fly.”
Cole looked around at her spotless kitchen void of any flying pests and frowned.
“Let’s check my office,” she said, and pivoted in that direction before he could ask more.
They entered the tidy square room lined with shelves of cookbooks and notes. It was much like Dell’s office at home, minus
the view, and permanently baked-in with kitchen smells.
“Happy thoughts, happy thoughts, happy thoughts,” Dell muttered to herself, trying to summon the energy needed to shuffle
papers and open drawers. She thought of opening night at Pergo, the first time she’d cooked in her new kitchen, the glowing
review Pierrick Moreau had just given her for what she didn’t even know was the last meal she’d ever cook. That final thought
dipped her mood, so she searched for another, and, once more, was hit with a vision of Cole. This time, he was mid-laugh,
head thrown back and wide smile. The joy emanating from vision-him somehow fused into her, filling her with a floating feeling
and the sudden strength to open her desk’s top drawer.
“Found a good one?” Cole asked.
“What?”
He nodded at her hand on the desk drawer handle. “You must have found a happy thought if you can pull that open.”
Dell looked down at her fingers curled beneath the handle. “Um . . . yes. I did. Come help me look.” She couldn’t bring herself to tell him she’d been thinking of him when she found the strength to move an object. An embarrassed heat raced up her back as he rounded her desk to stand beside
her.
“What exactly are we looking for?” he asked, and leaned in. His clean, minty smell came with him.
“Um . . . I don’t know. Anything lesson-like.”
“Like . . . ?” He drew out the word and leaned closer, having no idea he was making her dizzy with his scent and the heat of his
body. Not to mention the image of him laughing still floating like a hazy dream in her mind.
Dell turned to look up at him, feeling tiny in her bare feet and unable to stop her eyes from tracing the outline of his lips.
“Do you by chance like the snow?” she asked.
His full lips bent into a curious half smile. “What?”
She was still caught in his gaze, swimming in his dark eyes and looking for an answer to a question she hadn’t fully formed.
“The snow. Do you like being in it?”
Cole’s brow flattened. He pushed his lips out into a thoughtful pout, which only made them look more appealing. “I can’t say,
but I don’t see why I wouldn’t. Why do you ask?”
Because I keep having visions of you in it, with me, and I think we’re moments away from kissing, and I would like to kiss
you right now. The thought sped through her mind like a freight train. Luckily, she kept any words from coming out of her mouth.