“Jane, please. I didn’t mean—”
“I just…” She places a hand over my heart, and it breaks when I see her eyes shining with tears. “I have to make things right. I have to fix this mess. There’s so much that’s happened, so much I don’t even know where to begin.” She shakes her head and then releases another sigh.
“Jane—” Before I can finish, she leans up and presses a light kiss to my lips, just a taste, my hands flex at my sides but before I can grab on to her and make her stay, she’s moving away from me.
And then she’s gone.
Chapter Fifty-Four
“The soul should always stand ajar,
Ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”
-Emily Dickinson
Jane
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Molly bites her lip and sinks down lower into her seat. “I don’t think my brain can take this. It’s too much pressure, I think. I might explode.”
“Will you calm down, Rita? This is fun,” Viviana retorts from the front seat next to me.
“Yeah, it’s like a slumber party, Mavis,” April chimes in from the back seat next to Quinn and Molly. “Except we’re like grandma spies and cramped into this tiny ass car.”
“Hey,” Viviana snaps from the driver’s side. “Don’t diss my car.”
“My apologies.” April sighs and bites off a piece of Slim Jim, adjusting her overly large glasses.
“Hey, share, Pearl,” Quinn says to her from her squished place in the middle of the back seat. April hands her the same one she’s been eating and Quinn bites off a piece. I scrunch my nose, not at the sharing, but at the choice of food.
We were currently incognito, sitting outside of the Pierce Family Foods building waiting for Carl to make his move.
What move that was… I didn’t know quite yet. But I was sure if we watched him for long enough, I would find something that would help me fix everything.
I had decided to just take it upon myself to make everything right again, to take my mother’s mess into my own hands and fix it once and for all. The stress of finding out everything I had was wearing me thin and I didn’t think I could take it much longer.
So, the first thing I did was hire the best PI in town. His name was Liam Stokes and he was supposed to be the stealthiest PI there was.
But… the problem with hiring a PI was that I didn’t know what was going on until he found something. My brain demanded that I take action.
When I’d explained this to Molly, she told me she was “in.” Though I don’t think either of us totally knew what “in” was. Then I’d shown up at my apartment with her to gather supplies and totally forgot that I was supposed to do girls’ night with Viviana, April, and Quinn who was in town for just a week while her daughter spent time with her ex.
So, when I’d explained what I was doing, all three of them had shrugged their shoulders and declared they were also “in.”
I guessed it couldn’t hurt to have help.
Though five ladies in a car wandering around downtown and then essentially following someone weren’t exactly discreet.
It turned out April had a solution for that, hence the “incognito” part of the night. She had volunteered to lend us all some clothes, so we’d headed down to her shop and she’d taken it upon herself to dress us all.
As old ladies.
Yes, that’s right, old ladies.
For whatever reason, she had wigs in the back of her store as part of a failed marketing tactic and had never gotten rid of them. So, we all donned wigs of gray, black, and light blonde, all short and curly.
They’d also decided we needed code names. Molly was Rita, Viviana was Mavis, April was Pearl, Quinn was Dorothy, and I was Harriet. I think…
“Do you think he’ll come out soon, Harriet?” Viv asks from the front seat, fanning her pale-pink sweater against her chest. “It’s almost ten. What’s he doing in there?”