Page 104 of The Roommate Lie

“I’ll tell her myself. If she ever comes back, I’ll paint it on a sign and stick it in my yard.”

I’m pretty sure she’s joking about me being her favorite and about the sign, but we both get a good laugh out of it anyway. Then Edna gets quiet again, and my stomach pinches.

The worst is coming, the heartfelt part that might kill us both. And if Edna has to get this quiet and brace herself for it that hard, I need to brace myself too.

“I never had any kids of my own—you know that,” she says. “Jack and I both came from such big families. We’d spent years raising our cousins and siblings, and we never regretted not raising anybody else.”

Edna hesitates. Pace quick, eyes straight ahead.

“But I’m still claiming you as half mine,” she says, her voice gruff. “I’m too proud of you not to. And I wanted you to know.”

“Edna—”

“Can it, Roscoe. Let an old bird finish.”

She ups our pace a little more, her footsteps pounding against the sidewalk like she’s trying to outpace a hungry bear. If she’s doing it to keep me quiet, to make sure I’m so out of breath I couldn’t interrupt her if I tried, it works.

“I feel bad about the girl—I know you liked her. But I just needed you to know that even if it isn’t her, even if it doesn’t work out, one day somebody will. And when you find them”—Edna forces herself to look at me, her gaze finally meeting mine—“she’s going to be one lucky girl.”

I don’t know what to say. My eyes are surprisingly damp around the edges, and I dry them on my sleeve before responding the only way I can. Saying the only thing that feels right at a time like this.

“Edna…are you hitting on me?”

She barks out a laugh and punches my arm. I duck out of the way, laughing too. Then I catch her eye and stumble through an honest thank-you.

Edna elbows me as she saysyou’re welcome. Letting us enjoy that heartfelt moment for only a second before she pretends it never happened. Old Birds are pretty great that way.

Especially my favorite Old Bird.

As soon as I step back inside, I hear crying upstairs. It’s coming from the guest room, and my heart sinks.

Nicki.

She’s the only Kilpatrick who didn’t want to go out for lunch and keep sightseeing. I have to leave for my interview in five minutes, but I can’t just ignore her. She’s crying too hard.

I head upstairs and knock on the door, so I can check on her before I go. It takes Nicki a long time to answer, but that doesn’t mean she pulls herself together first. She can’t.

It’s one ofthosecries. Nicki can barely catch her breath as she opens the door, her tearstained face beet red. “Yes?”

She says that with a casual shrug, but she isn’t fooling anyone. I nod to the open laptop in her hands. “Is everything okay?”

“Of course. Everything’s fine.” She pauses to take a shuddering breath. “Why do you ask?”

Then she crumbles, breaking into a fresh wave of sobs as she clings to her laptop. I don’t have to ask her what’s wrong again. She surrenders, no coaxing necessary.

“I can’t make it work.” She gasps out another sob. “It’s impossible.”

She gestures to the screen on her laptop. It looks like she’s trying to play a game, something called Moonglow Prairie, but the first thing I notice is how small everything is—normal sized. My grandmother in Florida has had age-related macular degeneration for years. She’s lost her vision in a pretty similar pattern to Nicki, but nothing on Gram’s computer is ever normal-sized.

“Can you zoom in on the screen?” I ask. “Have you enabled that on your computer yet?”

For some reason, that question makes her weep harder. “I asked my ex to help me figure out how to do that once”—she pauses to sob a little—“but he said he didn’t have time. He said I probably didn’t need it anyway. That I was just being dramatic.”

Uh-oh.

I’ve accidentally brought up her dreaded ex. A man so vile, he didn’t just leave her when she started losing her vision—months before she got her official diagnosis—but he wouldn’t even help her set up the accessibility options on her computer while they were still together.Where do the Kilpatrick girls find these red-flag men?

It takes a few more minutes before I’m able to decipher the whole story. Before I piece together that she’s trying to play an old favorite video game she used to do with her brother, Marcus. That there’s been some big update, one he’s been texting her about all day, and the only thing this poor woman wants to do is play that game for herself. Like old times.

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