Page 50 of The Game Is Afoot

“Just say it.”

“What?”

“I know you want to say it. You keep looking at me.”

Jack leans over the pile of cut-up construction paper spread out on the living room floor in between us and kisses me. “I keep looking at you because I think you’re beautiful.”

“I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to distract me from the fact thatyou’vebeen so distracted instead of just saying what I know you want to say. And it’s not going to work. I won’t be distracted.” But then I kiss him back, immediately losing all of my credibility.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he murmurs on my lips.

I pull back and grab a pillow off the couch, putting it in between us as a buffer.

“When you repress your thoughts, it can lead to physical consequences in your actual throat. Did you know that? Like sores. Or tumors. And…and—throat disease.”

His smile is bracketed by two perfect parentheses.

“I’m sure the TikTok you learned that from was accurate.”

I scoff. “Uh, it was actually a Reddit postreferencinga TikTok.”

“Oh, so it was peer reviewed?” He arches an eyebrow, trying to hold in his laughter, but then falls right into it with me.

“Actually, you know,” he says a few minutes later, after we’ve gone back to our respective cutting projects—red hearts for him and green Shrek silhouettes for me. I can tell he’s trying to be low-key, with purposefully relaxed shoulders and a totally chill tone. “What you’re saying, about my throat…it does sound a lot like what I was telling you, about trauma in the body. How do you think you’re…dealing with that?”

I throw my scissors down, giggling again. “See! I knew you wanted to say it!”

He grins and puts his hands up, guilty. “I’mnotgoing to bring up therapy again, don’t worry. It’s just…I’ve been meaning to check in with you about how all the resting is going. And here we are on this Saturday night—a day of rest, one might say—working on elaborate party decorations.” He waves to thefelt Shrek headbands with the glue gun strings still hanging from them and the cake topper I made out of clay tonight after Pearl insisted she needed one with Shrek riding a rainbow unicorn. “Not to mention the whole murder investigation you’ve got going on, which I’ve also been meaning to check in about.”

“I’ve barely been investigating,” I say, as my eyes flick to the gratitude journal I was adding some more notes to before he arrived.

“Mr. Forest told me he caught you creeping around backstage. Does that have something to do with Coach Cole?”

“Mr. Forest told you that? Ipaidhis deposit.”

“Wait—you hired Mr. Forest for this so he wouldn’t tell anyone he saw you?”

“Anyway, that didn’t have anything to do with Cole. That was the other mystery,” I rush to add, before he can put together that thiswhole partyis happening so Mr. Forest wouldn’t tell anyone he saw me. I really should get a discount…

“You havetwomysteries now?” His face is a little bit exasperation, a little bit awe.

I quickly fill him in on Anabella getting the role of Annie, even though she sounds like Billie Eilish meets Fergie but bad, and the interaction I saw between Mr. Forest and Trisha after school on Tuesday. “I don’t know what, but I know she’s doing…something to him. We’ve got to watch them tomorrow.”

“And—I’m just trying to follow—this is all so…Pearl can be Annie?”

“I mean, I just wanted her to think that I was cool, but if she does get the part that would be an added bonus. Her voiceispretty good.”

Jack throws his head back in laughter and I feel proud, even though it may just be because exasperation inched into the lead.

He reaches over and threads his fingers through mine, pulling my hand onto his lap. “Listen, I love how you love your kid.” There’s that word again. So his tongue and lips and whatever else—the uvula?—are able to form it. It’s not, like, a mechanical problem. “And I’m here to help you always. I’m just saying, I’m pretty sure Pearl would think you were just as cool if you didn’t investigate the mystery of why her friend is Annie and cut out hundreds of hearts for her party decorations.” He nods toward the substantial pile he’s finished in the past hour.

“Well, those hearts aren’t for the party.”

“What? Why do you have me doing this then?”

“Because Mrs. Tennison asked me to cut out two hundred of them. I have to go hang them all up during recess, so the kids will think the Valentine’s Day fairy came or something. Do you think you can add some positive messages to some of them? She sent me a list of approved ones.”

“That’s a lot of work for her to expect from you. Why would she ask you to do that?”

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