Page 27 of The Way We Were(wolf)

But she couldn’t shake the feeling that, like the garland she’d had to rehang with several zip ties, her happiness was slowly unraveling.

“Where’s yourlover?” Stella asked, singing the last word of her question like an off-key Taylor Swift—as if TS could ever be off-key.

“Please don’t call Eric that. It’ll weird him out.” Lucy shook her head. “Frankly, it

weirds me out.”

“Sure thing, chicken wing.” She bumped her hip with Lucy’s as she grabbed a plate from the table. “And speaking of chicken wings…”

Lucy watched her cousin sashay to the buffet line, where several aluminum bins sat, filled to the brim with food whose scents mingled in the air into something so delicious Lucy’s mouth watered immediately.

Since the Fright Night celebration was tonight and the salon was closed for final preparations, Stella had dinner catered as a thank-you to her staff for all they’d done to keep business running when she’d been tending to her mom. And while Lucy had been waiting for Eric to come before she began stuffing her face with food—she wanted to at least say hello to him before she had an inevitable wing-sauce mustache—he was late, and she was starving.

She tried not to worry about his whereabouts, but this wasn’t like him. And yesterday, she tried to hide her concern when she’d seen him at work. Maybe he always looked like a lifeless zombie when he’d had a bad night, which is what he’d told her had happened the night before. Still, something seemed…off.

“Eric here yet?” Becky, one of the stylists at the salon, asked. It was an innocent enough question, so it shouldn’t have caused the tight knot in Lucy’s stomach that it had.

“Not yet.”

The clock on the wall ticked out seconds, each one a reminder that he should have been here by now—a couple hours ago, in fact. They’d agreed to get ready at the salon together—something she was looking forward to. And now he was two hours and one second late. Two seconds. Okay, she needed to get to the other side of the room before she had a wholeThe Tell-tale Heartsituation going on.

She rounded her desk and sat behind the counter as one sad little chicken wing rolled to the ground with a plop and a splatter of sauce that looked like a crime scene. The mess only made her sadder. Not because she’d have to clean it up but because the drips of sauce reminded her of how Eric had tended to her wound in this very room, not far from where her chicken wing had met its demise.

I’ll be there. You can trust me.

Maybe this was all her fault. Her un-Midas touch. Was this what happened when she trusted people? In the past, they’d come around and hurt her in some way. Now, trusting people made them vanish apparently. She suddenly felt as ghosted as the props in the window, but even more so because at least they had each other. Like her remaining chicken wing, she was all alone.

“Scooch, scooch,” Stella said as she rolled an extra chair behind the desk. Lucy almost didn’t recognize her cousin when she sat down beside her. Whatever white powder she’d used on her face, combined with the dark makeup below her eyes, she looked about as dead on the outside as Lucy felt on the inside. “I wanna sit with my very bestghoulfriend.”

“Well,” Lucy said, gesturing at her street clothes. “I’m not quite ghoulfriend-ready yet.”

“Either way, you look like you could use some company…and maybe a reason to smile.”

She definitely needed that. But when Stella pulled a slice of pumpkin roll from behind her back, the corners of her mouth pulled in the opposite directions for the first time all day.

“You didn’t,” Lucy said with a gasp as her cousin placed the decadent dessert in front of her. “How did you score this? And how did I not see it on the buffet line?”

Stella shook her head as she chewed a bite of her casserole, swallowing before she responded. “It wasn’t up there. This is Eric’s.”

“Oh,” she murmured, showing restraint she didn’t even know she possessed as she moved the plate away. “I shouldn’t eat it, then.”

“That hasn’t stopped you every day for the past three weeks.”

Lucy covered her face with her hands as her ears burned. “Are you kidding me

right now? I’ve been eating Eric’s dessert for the past three weeks, and you’re just now telling me? I thought the pumpkin roll in the break room was for everyone.”

Stella’s shoulders shook as she chuckled softly. “It wastherefor everyone, but I suspect he made it foryou.”

She looked at the roll in front of her, then back at her cousin, her eyes moving back and forth faster than a ping pong ball bouncing across the table at an Olympic gold medal match. There were so many questions floating around in her brain, far too many to take root and actually come out of her mouth. The best she could come up with was, “Ericmadethe pumpkin rolls?”

“Sure did,” Stella said with a bob of her head. “But I thought you knew. I mean, the only thing I make in the kitchen is smoke, and Becky only bakes her skin in the summer sun, which I keep telling her to stop doing, but she’ll never listen. You know, like, ninety percent of aging on the skin comes from the sun—”

“Stella,” she interrupted. “Focus.”

“Yeah, so a few weeks ago, Eric started asking me these strange questions, mostly related to baking. He asked if he was supposed to use a jelly roll pan to make a pumpkin roll. Heck if I knew. I told him maybe to use a pumpkin roll pan, but he didn’t think those existed. And it’s not like I spend much time perusing cooking aisles.”

“Of course,” Lucy replied, wishing this was the one time in her life her cousin would quickly get to the point of one of her stories.

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