Page 18 of To the Grave

She grabbed my hand. “Now tell me for real. Howareyou?”

I exhaled. “Not great. I mean, better now, but… it’s still hard. I miss him so much.”

Just saying the words made my eyes sting with tears. I’d been able to rally my strength in the name of justice for Jace, but I still felt like someone had taken an ice pick to my chest.

“Of course you do,” she said. “We miss him too. Give me your phone.”

We exchanged numbers and she gave me another hug. Then she told me she was going to call to check on me and we were definitely getting together soon for a longer conversation.

By the time we parted ways, I was feeling a bit better, about Ruth and everything else. Honey was only a few years older thanme, but I imagined this was what it would be like to have a big sister instead of being one, having access to a kind of oracle who’d been through all the shit you were going through and had survived it.

Would I turn my nose up at it like Ruth did to me? I didn’t think so. I was lost at sea, eager to cling to any flotation device that bobbed past.

I got to Benji and got into the passenger side. I missed driving the Mustang, missed the freedom of coming and going without worrying about someone watching me or planning to hurt me, but it was kind of nice to have Wolf and Otis always at the ready.

“How was it?” Wolf asked as I pulled the seat belt across my body.

“It was… fine.” It was hard to talk to Wolf and Otis about Ruth. They wouldn’t blame her for hating them but that didn’t mean I wanted to rub their faces in it. “I just want to go home and shower. I probably stink.”

I’d been sitting in my dried sweat from the gym, one of the downsides to meeting Ruth so early.

“You smell good to me,” Otis said.

I was sure he meant it as a compliment but it wasn’t high praise coming from a guy who liked the smell of motor oil.

“We’ll get you home so you can take a shower,” Wolf said, starting Benji’s engine. “Then you need to pack a bag.”

“Pack a bag? For what?”

He grinned and my heart stuttered in my chest. He was so beautiful with his tousled dark hair and inked arms, on display in a black sleeveless Black Crows T-shirt. “Just a little overnight, sunshine.”

“Whoa,” I said. “I’m going to need more details than that.”

“You missed our birthday,” Otis said from the back seat. “And we missed yours.”

“We didn’t miss it,” Wolf muttered.

“Wait… I missed your birthdays? Both of them?” I’d never had a reason to know their birthdays. They’d probably mentioned it at some point over the years in a kind of today’s-my-birthday kind of way, but they’d been Blake’s best friends, not mine. I hadn’t had a reason to know their birth dates. “When were your birthdays?”

“Wolf’s was August 14th,” Otis said, leaning forward. “Mine’s September 10th.”

My own birthday was September 26th. All those years, I’d never connected the dots that Otis and I had birthdays so close together.

Wolf sighed. “It’s not supposed to be about our birthdays. It’s supposed to be about Daisy’s.”

“I told you I didn’t want to celebrate mine.” They’d mentioned it, but I’d been deep in the throes of my depression at the time. Jace was dead. The last thing I’d wanted to do was celebrate my own life.

“I know.” Wolf reached out to tuck a piece of hair behind my ear. “And we get it. But we think it’s worth celebrating, and…”

“And?”

He exhaled. “We think Jace would think it’s worth celebrating too.”

I folded my arms over my chest, anger warring with the pain that tore through my chest at the mention of Jace. “That’s not fair.”

“Maybe not,” Otis said. “But it’s true.”

Wolf took my hand. “I know it’s hard, but we have to keep living. Besides, we have presents and I’m tired of waiting to give them to you.”

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