Page 68 of Tell Me Something True

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? Or you didn’t ask her?”

“I don’t know.”

Which meant he hadn’t asked her.

While he’d take a bullet for his sister, he had no qualms tossing her under the bus on this one.

“Let’s find her and see what she thinks,” Miles said.

“Okay.”

They went down the stairs. At the bottom, Ian slipped his hand into Miles’s.

His warm, sweaty, sticky hand.

And that faint scent of maple syrup made sense. “Did Aunt Vee make waffles for breakfast?”

Ian shook his head. “Pancakes. They were good.” He gave a furtive look around as if not wanting his missing aunt to overhear. “But not as good as Uncle Toby’s. She even burneded some.”

“Burned,” Miles corrected. “Guess she had other things on her mind.”

Things like befriending Reed Walsh.

And whatever it was she’d done with Tabitha after sending that picture to him.

The dog raced over to sniff at the base of the crab apple tree in front of Kat’s bedroom window. He lifted his leg, letting loose an impressive stream of piss, then ran back over to them. Butted Miles’s hand with his snout as if seeking some sort of acknowledgement of the excellent, and excessive, way he’d marked his territory.

His cool, damp, sticky snout.

“Did you share your pancakes with Titus?” he asked.

“Only one,” Ian said quickly.

“Only one bite? Or only one pancake?”

Ian let his head hang. The kid hated getting in trouble, rarely did anything they ever had to scold him for, let alone punish him for.

“Remember why we said you can’t feed dogs human food?”

“’Cuz it might make them sick,” Ian said quietly, head still hanging. He lifted his head, eyes wide. “But he was really, really hungry.”

“Then you could have given him some of Bella’s dog food.”

He knew Urban made sure Kat had plenty of supplies on hand for when Verity brought Bella along when she watched Ian.

Ian’s head lowered again, this time along with a good slump of his skinny shoulders.

Miles gently squeezed his nephew’s hand. “Dogs can’t decide what food is good or bad for them, so the people taking care of them have to make those decisions. Okay?”

Ian sighed the sigh of the long-suffering and dejected.

He was spending way too much time with Verity.

“Okay.”

On they trooped, a cop in uniform, a shirtless boy, and a dog racing excited circles around them as they searched for his missing sister, the delinquent she was curious about, and the woman who’d ripped Miles’s heart from his chest and ground it to dust under her heel.

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