“What? No—I mean. No,” I decided, because it was easier than trying to explain whatever had happened. Mom had enough to deal with already—she didn’t need her eldest daughter coming off the rails already. I had to be there for her. Not the other way around. I grabbed her hands and squeezed them tightly. “I’m fine,” I said again, and this time I put my heart into it. “I’m okay. Glad to be home.”
“I know it’s a lot,” she replied, and we moved out of the foyer and back toward the parlor again. “But things have changed. People have changed.”
But how much had stayed the same?
I couldn’t tell her that, at the airport, I had debated on whether or not to turn around and go back to my apartment. Skip the funeral. Burrow myself in a murder podcast. Try to forget that Dad was dead. That he was never coming back. That I would never get to, not ever, not while he was alive, tell him about my career, and my ghostwriting, and share with him all of the starred reviews and—
Stop. Stop thinking.
“Besides,” I said, trying to bury my thoughts, “I couldn’t let the family fall apart without their favorite disaster child.”
“You aren’t a disaster,” Mom chided.
“No, she definitely is,” Carver argued, and Mom hit him in the shoulder. Karen called her over and she left us for the parlor. Carver asked, putting his hands in his worn jean pockets, “Who was at the door?”
“A ghost.”
He blinked. As if he wasn’t sure whether I was lying or tellinga particularly bad joke, but then I smiled and he barked a laugh. “Ha! If it was Dad, I hope you thoroughly chewed him out.”
“Gave him what for.”
“Really?”
“No. No one was at the door,” I lied, and he melted a little.
My brother was a lot of things—a smartass, a computer tech guru, and a gullible mess. He was like the glue that kept the Day siblings together. I couldn’t remember the last time Alice talked to me of her own volition.
“You never know. I mean, when we were kids—”
“How are you and Nicki?” I interrupted.
“Good,” he replied, annoyed that I’d changed the subject, but he took the hint as he led me back into the parlor. “So, did you figure out what to do with the editor for Christina Lauren?”
“Christina and Lauren write their own books,” I replied automatically. “But no, I didn’t.”
“So what happened?”
“Dad died. I came home.”
“You never turned it in?”
“Can’t turn in half a book.”
“Do you think you could—I don’t know—copy and paste the same chapter fifty times, turn that in, and by the time your editor realizes you turned in the wrong thing, you’d have the book done?”
I stared at my brother in surprise. “That’s...”
“A great idea, right?”
“Aterribleidea,” I replied. Then I frowned, and thought about it for a moment. “It might work.”
“Ha! See? You’re welcome. I’m a genius.”
Maybe Carver’s ploy could give me enough time. Not much—butenough. The ghost I saw at the door—it wasn’t a ghost. It was ahallucination. Benji Andor couldn’t bedead. I’d kissed him last night! And he looked healthy, and he wasn’tthatold, and as far as I could tell, it would take a lot to murder someone akin to a tree trunk.
He was fine.
It was a trick of my brain—the imaginary ghost of my new editor whom I’d accidentally made out with in a back alley in Brooklyn coming to haunt me because I was already stressed out and chugging along on three hours of sleep and four cups of airplane coffee.