Page 41 of Lyrical

In other words:Case closed. I couldn’t stop him from doing God knew what somewhere else, but it wasn’t happening right below me. And it really was freezing down there this time of year. I could set up heaters once in a while but not leave them running day and night, and with the garage door always opening, letting in the cold air….

“Wait, you said Cassie left her door open fortwodays? How could she go that long without feeling the cold air blowing in?”

“Because she wasn’t home. She was in Chicago, and then she only stopped home quick to change and grab something before the party.”

“What’d she have to grab?”

“I don’t know, Mom. I waited in the car.” He looked at me strangely. “What does that matter?”

All these questions started rising inside me, bubbling up faster than I could handle. I was scrambling to capture them all before they got away.

“So she didn’t take a shower for two days?”

“She did in Chicago before we left. You’re kinda acting—”

“Beforeweleft?”Wait a freaking minute.All those questions and I was only focusing on Saturday? “She was with you? For the interview?”

“She didn’t sit in the room with me during that hour, but yeah, she was with me the rest of the time. I thought you knew that.”

I jerked my head sharply.No, I did not fucking know that. How would I know that?

“Mom, are you okay?”

“You told me you just saw her for the first time again on Friday morning.”

“I did.” His mouth twisted into a goofy smile. “Yeah, it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. All really sudden.”

Ya think?“She comes over and says hello and then she just hops in your—my—car and that’s that?”

Who the hell does that?

“Basically. Once we started talking again, we didn’t want to stop. Next thing I knew, we were driving to Chicago together. I’d planned to come home that night, but we were having such a great time we just decided to stay.”

“And you all just stayed over in some tiny college apartment?”

“No, we hung out with Jason, then got a hotel room for the night.”

“A hotel?” I’d probably said it way louder than I intended. No, I definitely intended it to be loud. A fucking hotel?

He laughed a bit. “We just needed a place to stay. It’s not what you’re probably thinking.”

What I was thinking was that the answer to my ‘who the hell does that’ question was now solved.Ding ding ding. A slut.

The fact that I’d slept with Chase within hours of meeting him hadn’t escaped me, but I’d been around long enough to have raised a son into adulthood, and I had a seventeen-year marriage under my belt. If I wanted to be a slut, I’d earned that right.

The only thing she’d earned was a big ole box of ‘stay the fuck away from my family.’

“I know you’ve always had really good judgment, Daniel, but I’m wondering what happened here. How well do you really know this woman? What if she’d turned out to be an ax murderer and hacked you up while you were sleeping?”

“What?”

“I never even heard anything about her when you were at East Shore. Were you seeing each other then?” If so, I didn’t know a damn thing about it.

“No.”

“Were you friends, at least?”

“No, but how does that make a difference? She was a senior. I wouldn’t expect her to notice me as a sophomore. But it was hard not to have a thing for her. Most of the guys did.”

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