Cara #2
Lucy swept in with Spencer just behind her, and I took one look at her and laughed out loud.
Full flapper—fringe dress, long beaded necklace, a headband with a single dramatic feather.
Spencer was in a charcoal suit with a wide tie and a fedora pushed back on his head, and he looked at Lucy with the expression of a man who knew he was the luckiest man in the world.
“Lady Margaret Holloway would be honored,” I told her.
“Lady Margaret Holloway would be intimidated,” Lucy said, and handed me her coat.
I welcomed everyone, introduced the case, and watched the room lean forward before I’d even finished.
“Lady Margaret Holloway, found dead in the drawing room of Ashwood Manor on the morning of October the fourteenth, 1923. A gathering of guests, any one of whom had reason to want her gone.” The room was already murmuring before I’d finished the setup, which was exactly what I wanted.
I called the first round. Envelopes were opened, clues read aloud, and the debate that followed was immediate and delightfully chaotic.
Grandma had already produced a small notebook from her handbag and was writing things down with the focused intensity of someone intent on winning.
Grandpa sat beside her with his flat cap pushed back and his clue card held at arm’s length, squinting at it with the expression of a man who had misplaced his reading glasses and was not going to admit it.
Aunt Nancy, on Grandma’s other side, was reading her clue card with narrowed eyes of a woman who had worked the Pennywhistle long enough to have seen every kind of human behavior and trusted none of it.
I moved through the room answering questions with the practiced neutrality of someone who knew all the answers and was enjoying not giving them.
I was enjoying all of it, actually. The warm candlelit room, the costumes, the laughter rising and falling, the feeling of having made something that worked.
Last time I had spent the whole evening half inside my own head, monitoring everything, braced for something to go wrong. Tonight I was just—here to enjoy it.
I caught Jasper’s eye across the room, and the look he gave me was pure heat—dark, hungry, and full of promise. It hit me like a spark to dry tinder, instantly flooding my mind with the memory of our kiss.
Beside him, Lucy had the expression of someone collecting evidence—except the evidence she was collecting had nothing to do with Lady Margaret Holloway and everything to do with the way Jasper was looking at me from across the room.
She had her clue card in one hand and her teacup in the other, and she wasn’t entirely focused on either of them.
I caught Jasper’s eye, and he grinned at me, from across a room full of people in Halloween costumes arguing about a fictional murder, and I thought that this was possibly one of the best evenings of my life.
About fifteen minutes into the first round, I saw Jasper’s hand go to his pocket. He glanced at his phone, and something moved across his face—a tightening, quickly controlled—and he looked up at me with an apologetic half-nod, stood carefully, and slipped out the back.
Lucy noticed. She looked at me across the room with a question in her eyes, and I gave a small shake of my head and kept the round moving.
He came back when the five-minute break started, his expression composed and carefully neutral. He came straight to me at the back counter, close enough that no one else could hear.
“Sorry about that.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” He paused just a half-second too long. “It was Emmett. Nothing important.”
He didn’t offer more. His eyes were on my face, watchful in a way that told me he knew I’d clocked the fact that he hadn’t told me everything.
I looked at him for a moment—this man who was usually so easy with me, so straightforward, so careful about saying true things—and felt a knot settle quietly in my stomach.
Not alarm, exactly. Just the low hum of something being held back by someone who didn’t usually hold things back.
The room was full, and the second round was waiting, and this was not the moment.
“Okay,” I said.
He studied my face, then squeezed my hand once, briefly, and let go. I picked up the teapot and walked back out to start the next round and did not look at him for a while after that.
The break before the third round came, and I needed air.
I told the guests two minutes and went down the hallway, through the back room, and out onto the alley.
The cold hit hard and immediately, and I stood in my costume with my arms around myself and breathed it in.
After the warmth and noise of the shop, it felt like surfacing—the alley quiet, the single streetlight at the far end casting its pale circle on the ground, jack-o’-lanterns glowing orange on the steps of the building across the way, the sky above the rooftops dark and clear and very Halloween.
I looked up at the sky for a moment, breathing in the cold, letting the noise of the evening fall away behind me. I looked back toward the street and my stomach lurched.
A man was on the opposite sidewalk under the light.
Hands in his pockets. Still. He hadn’t been there a second ago—or he had, and I hadn’t seen him, which was somehow worse.
He wasn’t passing through, wasn’t checking his phone, wasn’t waiting for anyone.
He was just standing there in the dark, watching the lit windows of my shop with the patience of someone who had been there long enough to get comfortable.
Eric.
The cold I felt then had nothing to do with the October air.
He had positioned himself just inside the pool of the streetlight—not hidden, not announcing himself either, just present in a way that felt deliberate. Calculated. Like he wanted me to see him watching me. Like that was the whole point.
We looked at each other across the distance, and he didn’t move.
Didn’t startle, didn’t shift, didn’t have the decency to look like a man caught somewhere he shouldn’t be.
He just held my gaze from across the alley with a stillness that made my skin crawl, and I understood with a cold, clear certainty that he had been standing there for a while.
That he had been waiting for exactly this—for me to come outside and find him.
Then, slowly, he tipped his chin at me. A single, deliberate nod. Like a promise.
Then he turned and walked away without hurrying, hands still in his pockets, disappearing around the corner as if he had all the time in the world, because as far as he was concerned, he did.
I stood on the landing until the sound of his footsteps had completely faded, my heart going hard in my chest, the anger and something colder underneath it sitting side by side in a way I hated.
I took a deep breath and steeled my spine, because he did not get this night.
There was a room full of people on the other side of that door waiting for me, and that was what tonight was. Not this.
I opened the door and walked back inside because screw him. This was my night, and he didn’t deserve any part of it.
“Sorry about that,” I told the guests, and smiled like I meant it, which by the time I reached the front of the room, I almost did. “Third round.”
The final clue cracked the case open the way I’d hoped—a gasp from the back row, a triumphant sound from someone who had been right all along and wanted everyone to know it, and then the room dissolving into the warm, satisfied noise of people who had just been genuinely surprised and were pleased about it.
The doctor, to warm applause and considerable argument from the guests who had been certain it was the niece right up until the last envelope.
Grandma had been right from the second round, and she simply sat with her hands folded on the table wearing a small, satisfied smile that said everything without saying anything.
Grandpa patted her hand and looked proud.
Nancy had suspected the chauffeur until the very end and was loudly revising her theory in real time, insisting she had always known it was the doctor.
Lucy caught my eye across the room and pressed her lips together.
I said goodbye, thanked everyone, promised details for next month, and watched the room empty in happy clusters—costumes and coats and the last of the cookies wrapped in napkins and tucked into handbags.
Hannah hugged me on the way out and whispered that it was the best evening she’d had in months.
Grandma held my face in both hands and said nothing, which from her said everything.
Grandpa squeezed my shoulder and looked around the shop one more time before he left.
The last guest left, trailing laughter behind her, and then the shop was quiet.