Page 29 of Just a Heartbeat Away

“Ah.” Via frowned. Who the hell were the women he was dating if they disapproved of Matty? Matty, the sweetest kid of all time. And anyone with eyes could see how important he was to Sebastian. “Fin would never hold that against you. If that’s what you mean. We both grew up in nontraditional homes, so she definitely understands the importance of family in a kid’s life.”

“Cool.” He shrugged and looked forward. Suddenly a small blush rose up out of the collar of his worn green button-down. He shifted. “Uh. You mind if I ask just how psychic she really is?”

Via laughed in delight. Jeez. He really was cute. All masculine and nervous at the same time.He and Fin would make a cute couple, she told herself. “Not as much as you’re probably imagining. She can’t touch your hand and know your bank pin or something. More, she’s just intuitive. And she’s usually right about everything. Annoyingly so.”

He chuckled, but he still seemed a little nervous. “All right.” He cleared his throat and suddenly looked very, very uncomfortable. “She doesn’t talk to the dead, does she?”

Oh.

The air turned to ice in Via’s lungs. She understood what he was really getting at now. His wife. Of course. She was sure he’d come to have certain beliefs about the afterlife after his wife had died. Most people did. It was a coping mechanism. But it had only been two and a half years or so, by her calculations. She was sure that he wasn’t completely over it. And he certainly wouldn’t want some spooky psychic attempting to make contact with his deceased wife over a Friday night date.

“No,” Via answered resolutely. “She doesn’t do that.”

“Cool,” he repeated, then turned his attention to the front of the room where Principal Grim was clinking her ring against her water glass.

Via missed the first ten minutes of the meeting. She couldn’t explain it. Her mind was just elsewhere.

HERMINDWASstill elsewhere, when, later that night, she pulled a lasagna out of her oven and set it, steaming, on the table just under Evan’s nose.

“Damn,” he murmured. “That smells great, babe.”

He finished slicing the bread he’d brought over from his house and slid it into a bread basket. Next, he gave the salad he’d made one more fluff with the tongs and then he gestured outward with his hands like a magician.

“Dinner is served.”

Via laughed and brought over silverware and plates and slid into the seat across from him. One of the things that she’d first loved about Evan was how willing he always was to help cook. She’d given him a breadmaker for Christmas last year and had been pleased to see that he actually used it.

She served herself some salad while he sliced up the lasagna, trying to wipe the frown from her face before he looked up and saw it.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, already sounding a little exasperated. But that might have just been her imagination.

“Nothing!” she said brightly. She felt it would be petty, after he’d made the bread and assembled the salad, to remind him that she really didn’t care for raw onion in her salad. She’d told him before that she felt the strong flavor ruined the entire salad, but either he kept forgetting or he simply didn’t care. She held in a sigh. She’d just eat around it.

He served her some lasagna, took a mondo bite of his own and dropped his head back. “Holy God, V. That is pretty much the best thing I’ve ever tasted.”

Her annoyance with him waned just a little. “I’m glad.”

“So, how was your day at work?”

Pleased that he’d asked, Via opened her mouth to answer but closed it again immediately when it wasn’t her students’ faces who flashed through her mind’s eye, but Sebastian’s. More specifically, it was the concerned look on his face he’d had when he’d asked about Serafine’s psychic abilities. She frowned down at her plate.

“That bad?” Evan asked in surprise, attempting to interpret her expression.

“What? No.” She looked up at him, chewing too much food in his mouth, his movie star hair falling across his forehead, and a strangely familiar feeling opened up in her chest. It was like a cold draft against a window that wasn’t sitting correctly in its jamb. The feeling disconcerted her. She hadn’t had it in years, but it had been happening a lot lately. Somewhere around the beginning of the school year, the feeling had been making itself at home again.

Why in God’s name would she be feeling this chilly, drafty feeling right now? She used to have it when she was younger and completely alone and spinning from one untethered situation to the next. There was no reason for her to be having itnow. She loved Evan. He’d helped her make dinner, he was asking about her day and looking so handsome it hurt, with his dark eyes and angular face.

She watched him reach out for seconds of the lasagna as he waited for her to gather her thoughts. She frowned. She knew from experience that in his second serving, he’d take too much, wouldn’t be able to finish it and would throw the remaining bites into the trash. She literally had to turn away when he did it. Even the sound of that much food falling heavily into the trash made her wince.

“My day was actually pretty good,” she said after a minute. “I made some progress with that boy Agwe I was telling you about.”

“The Haitian one?”

She nodded. “Yup. He and his dad arrived in Brooklyn about three days before school started. I think it helps our relationship that I’m as new at that school as he is.”

Evan pushed his plate away from him, still half full with lasagna he wouldn’t eat but would claim was too unsanitary to put away now that it had been on his plate and touched by his fork. “What’s wrong then? I can tell something is wrong.”

That drafty feeling whistled through her chest again and Via almost made herself ignore it. But she remembered something that a social worker had once told her. That bad feelings were like monsters in the closet at night. If you got a friend, opened the closet and shined a light in there, the monster would up and disappear, nowhere to be found. The point being that bad feelings often subsided if you told someone about them. It was a tenet that Via had tried to live her life by, and it was a testament to how tumultuous her childhood had been that she could no longer even remember the face of the social worker who’d let her in on that particular secret.

---