Like me, Emery was happy for our friend.
After dinner, we rode back to my house, and I put her overnight bag in my bedroom while she went to the office and got set up for practice. By the time I made my way down there, the lights were off, her amp was hooked up, and her headlamp was on. I took a moment to appreciate her like that, lit only by the glow of her flashlight as it reflected off the metal door of the safe.
She knelt in front of it, wearing her sexy dress, and her unsexy headphones, lamp, and white gloves. But all that did nothing to detract from her. I assumed watching her was like watching a painter create art, only her canvas was a paper graph taped to the front of the safe door.
I used the light from my phone to guide my way to the chair I watched from and did my best to stay quiet. I didn’t want to distract her, and yeah, it’d probably be better if I wasn’t in the room, but . . . I liked being near her. So, I attempted to be a statue, so she’d forget I was there.
I was surprised how long it took her to catch on to what I’d done tonight. She marked a dot on her paper, only to erase it after another pass around the dial, and glared at her graph like it was written in a foreign language.
Abruptly, she pulled off her headphones, straightened her posture, and began to dial in the combination. She turned it to the right until she hit sixty-nine, spun to the left to get to zero, and then repeated with the same two numbers. When the wheel on the door was turned, the safe swung open.
She flashed me an amused smile and yanked off her gloves with a snap of the latex. “Nice.”
I tossed a hand up in a ‘why not’ gesture. “Let’s go for a walk.”
Once she had everything put away, I took her hand, led her through the house, and out the back onto the balcony. It was late and the sun had set hours ago, but it was also mid-July, which meant other than the humidity, it was nice outside.
Her heels clicked across the stone tiles as I pulled her toward the stairs that led down to the gardens. The landscape lights were on, casting a warm glow on the trees surrounding the perimeter of the lawn.
“Where are we going?” she asked, genuinely curious.
“You’ll see.”
We came down the stairs and took the path to the left that curved around the roses I’d been told my grandmother planted, heading for the thick wall of meticulously maintained evergreens. The hedges were nearly eight feet tall, and the maze was full of dead ends and switchbacks. To a regular person trying to solve it, it was likely confusing during the day. With the subdued light at night, it had to be daunting.
We stepped off the stone paver path and onto the pebbled one, making our feet crunch softly as we walked through the entrance. Emery’s eyes went wide as she gazed around, taking in the hedges and the narrow tunnel they created.
“This is amazing,” she said.
Like Monaco, I got to see it through new eyes as I watched her experience the maze.
“Do you want me to show you how to get to the center, or do you want to try—”
“Don’t tell me.” She was already a few steps ahead and considering which side of the first branch to take. “I want to try.”
I chuckled. “I figured.”
She guessed wrong, but I kept my mouth shut. When she turned the corner and reached a dead end, she peered at the statue replica of the Venus de Milo for a moment, and I half expected her to ask it for directions. Instead, she turned around and breezed right past me, determined to get back to the fork and try the path she hadn’t chosen.
We meandered through the maze, not in any rush, but she moved with an excited quickness. She was a lot like me in that she viewed life as a series of games, and she was competitive too. I was glad she always played to win.
She began to drag her feet at turns, drawing lines in the pebbled path in an attempt to mark her progress. It was a smart idea, but it wasn’t much help as we got closer to the center. There were two long walls strategically placed that created loops, leading back to where she’d started.
But Emery was so clever, I suspected she’d drawn a map inside her head, and she knew exactly where to try next. She turned to her left, rounded the corner, and gasped when she spied the tiered water fountain at the center of the large, open space.