Page 114 of Ruined Beta

He laughs. “In theory, it sounds pleasant. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’d get enough work to keep us afloat if we moved the agency to a small town.”

“Damn,” I murmur. “There goes that idea, I guess.”

I roll the window down a little for air once we’re starting to pass signs of nature.

The air in the city isn’t the cleanest. I don’t have real issues with it, but the difference is obvious.

“Do you miss Silver Lake?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I admit.

I lived there forever. It’s where I grew up. It was home.

Yet, I don’t have an instant response to hearing those words.

I was a little sad about leaving the house, I guess.

A lot of memories were made there.

But Silver Lake isn’t my home now, and I’m not sad about that.

“Too early to tell?” E.A. asks.

“No,” I tell him, as we come to a street I can park on. “I think towns and cities are just places. People are what make a place a home. I’m in Cressidan City because it’s where Secret is. Nothing else matters.”

At least, nothing else mattered until I also discovered I have true mates.

Lucky we’re all in the same place. Otherwise, I might have a difficult choice to make.

I park the car and look at E.A. “I need to get directions to this kid’s address.”

“Right,” he says, passing me my phone.

“Actually, I need my tablet out of my purse. This isn’t a smart phone, unfortunately.”

“Toshi and Echo will make sure they get you a new handset as soon as they realize that,” he tells me, picking up my purse and passing it to me. “Even I have a smartphone. The work phone I have, I mean. I can’t stand it. I liked having a cell phone before those came out.”

“Feel free to switch with me,” I tell him. “I just tend to keep old things because new ones are too expensive.”

That, and I use to spend most of my money on drinking. It took a long damn time to replace that bad habit with saving. If I’d upgraded my phone and my car once I had more money, I wouldn’t have had too much left in savings. That money helped me get things rolling when it came to selling the house.

It would have been harder without it.

I take my tablet out of my purse and pass E.A. back the purse, and my phone.

Switching on the tablet, I glance at the little red line of battery and cross my fingers that it’s enough.

“Okay. Remind me the address. It’s in my text messages.”

He looks at my phone. “Orchard Avenue, number thirty-three.”

I type it in and pull up directions from my location.

A set of instructions come up on the screen.

I look out the windscreen to check where I’m headed.

“First left up ahead,” I tell myself, as I pass E.A. the tablet. “Keep reading the directions as I go. You’re my personal Sat Nav for the morning.”

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