Page 361 of The Winslow Brothers

I like the sound of her needing to grab a surprise, so I offer a thumbs-up, a smile, and a promise. “I’ll be right here.”

The sound of her retreating footsteps fades away, and then I hear the soft thud of her padding around on the floor above me. When she returns, her breathing is slightly labored as though she’s been running around, and I can’t help but smile. “What’s up there? A back, back room? A back attic? A back bakery?”

She laughs a little, surprise cutting the noise short and ending it in a near snort. “Oh. No. I guess I forgot you didn’t know this already, but I live up there. That’s my apartment.”

My eyebrows rise, though I doubt she can see them under the napkin blindfold.Nowthatis interesting.

“That’s cool. Convenient for work.”

She laughs. “Yeah, and it’s a good price too. My sister and her wife let me live there for free in exchange for part-time bakery work.”

I smile. “I’m glad to see you have a tight-knit family too. I never knew my dad—he left when I was little—but the rest of us are about as tight as it gets.”

“Yeah,” she replies. “I noticed.”

“This is actually fun. Not seeing you butseeingyou.”

“What do you mean?”

“I like finding things out about you. What else do I need to know? Tell me all about Rachel Rose and how she came to be here now.”

She snorts. “Well, if you ask my father, it’s been a long and winding, quite unnecessary road.”

I save my comments for later, giving her the space to continue.

“I guess you could say I was a bit of a wanderer. I went to college on the West Coast, at Stanford, and then…just kind of stayed out there.”

I hear her getting closer, opening something, and then rearranging the napkin to where it just covers my eyes. Next thing I know, something cold and a little tacky feeling is being spread all over my face.

And I don’t say shit. Because she’s talking and sharing and opening up, and I don’t care what I have to sit through to facilitate its continuation.

I do flinch at the weird feeling, though, and her laugh is nearly evil. “What’s wrong? Want me to stop?”

I shake my head just enough to get my point across without sending whatever she’s painting on me all over my cheeks. “Nope. Keep talking, keep doing whatever it is you’re doing.”

She giggles again. “Okay, then.” I feel some sort of a brush move over the ridge of my nose, and I wiggle it at the tickle.

“So, what did you do out there?”

“Where?”

“On the West Coast? After school? On the long and winding road.”

She sighs, a laugh mixing in that makes me smile. “A bunch of stuff, really. For a while, I waitressed at a place on Pacific Coast Highway, and then I dabbled in working for some Hollywood insider parties. I was a huge nobody—a nobody to the nobodies, really, but it was fun for a while.”

“And after that?”

She pauses briefly, both in her speech and the movement of her hand, and I hold my breath, willing her to continue. “Well, that’swhen all the social media influencer stuff really started to take off, so I got involved in that.”

I chuckle. I don’t want to ruin the mood, but hot damn, I know her father well enough to guess how that went over. “I bet Professor Rose loved that.”

She snorts. Like, actual snot-bubble, saliva-trapped sounds coming from her snorts. “Oh yeah, it was his most cherished dream for his baby girl.”

“Did you like it?”

“Actually? Yeah. For a while, anyway,” she admits, a softness and truth in her voice. “I was good enough at it that it was viable, at least. My YouCam account had reached the point where it was easily paying the bills and just letting me do my thing, but even I knew it wasn’t my long-term goal in life.”

“What is your long-term goal in life, then?”

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