Page 58 of Fatal Betrayal

"Very," he agreed.

She lowered her voice. "Is your dad okay? He disappeared pretty quick."

"I'm guessing he's watching the end of the Dodgers' game. They're playing in New York today."

She smiled. Doug had taken her and Cooper to a couple of games at Dodger Stadium. Kyle had never been interested in baseball, but Cooper was, of course, a great player. Monica had refused to tag along, announcing that she'd watched Cooper play enough games; she didn't want to watch anyone else. So, Doug had taken the two of them and bought them Dodger dogs and cotton candy.

"Are you still a Dodger fan?" she asked Cooper.

"Can't be anything else in this town. What about you?"

"I have paid little attention to baseball in a long time." She paused. "Is your room still your room?"

"Not really."

"Let's see," she said, moving toward the stairs. Every step felt like she was going back in time. She was running up the stairs with Cooper to play a game or plot some mystery out on the floor of his bedroom.

When she reached the second-floor landing, she pushed open the door to his room. It was more the same than he'd admitted. Sure, a few things had changed, like the comforter and pillows on the bed were much more adult, and Cooper's posters of baseball players and rock stars were gone from the walls. But there were still books in the bookcase from his youth, including a stack of yearbooks.

"You still have the yearbooks," she said, grabbing the top one off the shelf and sitting down on the bed to open it. "Freshman year. I must have signed this."

Cooper pulled out the chair by his old desk and sat down across from her. "You wrote a Dr. Seuss quote."

She laughed. "I forgot about that." She found it on the first page of signatures and read it aloud. "Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind."

"It was your favorite saying. You thought it excused everything you did that annoyed people, because you were just being yourself."

"I was an obnoxious kid, wasn't I?"

Cooper grinned in a way that she hadn't seen in a long time, because he was giving her an actual genuine smile.

"You were…you," he replied. "You said what you thought even when most people didn't want to hear it. You barreled ahead, past everydon't-go-past-this-pointsign. You stood up for people you didn't think had a loud enough voice. And you always expected success, even when the odds were long. That just made you more determined."

"So, a little obnoxious," she murmured.

"Along with pushy and bossy. You'd get stuck on something, and you'd just gnaw on it like a dog with a bone."

"Okay, now you're getting carried away. It's not like you were Mr. Perfect."

"Well, I wasn't obnoxious," he said with a laugh.

"No. You were annoyingly smart, often right when I didn't want you to be, and way too logical when I was brimming over with righteous indignation. But you also had a way with people. You knew how to make friends better than I did. When we got to high school, many people liked you, especially girls. You were hanging out with the popular kids; I was not. But that's when you started getting weird."

"How so?"

"I don't know. You just didn't act the way you used to. It's like I said before, you got sullen and quiet. And sometimes you gave me a funny look." She paused as his expression now reminded her of that funny look. An odd tingle ran down her spine as she realized now what she hadn't seen at fourteen. Cooper wasn't staring at her like he was mad at her, he was looking at her like he was attracted to her and didn't want to be.

"You just got it, didn't you?" he asked, meeting her gaze. "I can see it in your big brown eyes. It finally clicked in."

"You liked me?" she asked, surprised by that thought. "In a more than best buddy kind of way?"

"Yes, and it was confusing. I didn't know what to do about it. You were my best friend since we were eight, and then suddenly you were a girl. I didn't want to lose you as a friend. But I also didn't like when you started talking about other guys, especially Jeremy." He curled his lip in disgust.

"What was wrong with Jeremy?"

"He was a jerk—stupid, arrogant, full of himself."

"You just described every guy in our freshman class, including yourself." She shrugged. "Jeremy never looked twice at me anyway. He was too caught up in that slut, Kendall Richmond."

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