Page 73 of Till Death Do Us Part

I nodded and Hayden said it wouldn’t be a problem. He’d always been flexible with my schedule. I wasn’t a major player here yet. I was basically Elsa’s assistant, and she mostly had me doing things to make her life easier.

“Where is Elsa?” he asked.

“She went to check on the exhibit.” She was leaving the office more and more after the accident. She’d say she needed a break, or she was going to check on something. Hayden was starting to notice.

“Does she seem a little…off to you lately?”

She did, but I didn’t want to confide in Hayden about my worries for Elsa. I knew what was going on in her life, but maybe Hayden didn’t. And I wasn’t sure that was all it was, family issues. I just had a sinking feeling more was going on, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. “I think she’s just trying to recover from the wreck.”

“So scary what happened to you two. It was probably someone texting and driving.”

“Maybe.” We never found out who was driving the first car that hit us.

“There’s Elsa!” Hayden’s voice was too high and excited, like he was trying to make her feel better by being happy to see her.

“Where’s Roma?” she asked.

I lifted my head over the roses. Cassio stood next to Elsa. Adelasia was between them. I stood completely and fixed my black cardigan dress.

“Do you have time for a walk?” I asked Cassio.

“A short one.” He sauntered over to my desk and plucked the card from the roses. He roared with laughter. “‘Roses are red, violets are blue, I hope you don’t think I’m stalking you,’” he read aloud.

That poem was hand-written on the card. Jack had put “ha ha”underneath and that he hoped to get to know which color rose was my favorite one day.

“Give me that.” I snatched it out of Cassio’s hand and stuck it back in the bouquet.

“I’ll take Adelasia to see some of the new exhibits,” Elsa offered. Adelasia’s head bobbed up and down and she grabbed Elsa’s hand.

Hayden’s voice met our backs as we all walked out together. “I guess we don’t work around here anymore...”

Elsa and Adelasia went in one direction. Cassio and I walked with no true destination. We ended up at the mating exhibit.

“Dinosaurs getting it on,” he said, almost fascinated, hands tucked in his pockets. “That’s something you don’t think about every day.”

“Unless you’re studying it.” I had. Their mating rituals fascinated me.

“Takes all the fun out of it. The romance. It’s too scientific.”

“We’re talking about prehistoric creatures. They no longer exist.”

“I wouldn’t want someone studying my moves when I’m dead and gone. I’m too good to be studied. I’d be responsible for a baby boom.”

He watched the screen for a second, listening to the proper English inflection describe a mating ritual. The voice went on about “scraping,” and how meat-eating theropods used fancy footwork displays to attract mates, like the way some modern-day ground nesting birds do. The screen switched to the T-rex and how they used visual and vocal sounds.

“Just think,” he almost muttered to himself. “We go extinct, what will some future species think are our mating rituals today? Poles and a strip club? Computers with porn? That digital movie channel and chill?Roses are red, violets are blue, I hope you don’t think I’m stalking you.

“Humans have gone backward. What a bunch of lazy chumps the men in this world have become when it comes to romance. I bet scraping was a real romantic thing to do. This thing says some of the marks were found today. They must have really dug those talons in. And vocals? I bet that T-rex crooned like fucking Dino Sinatra.” He gave a roar that went up and down an octave.

“What’s going on, Cassio?”

It took him a second to pull himself away from the screen, and then he looked me in the eye. “You know it’s for the best.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“The accident.” At his words, his face turned cold and hard. He was one of the first ones on the scene, and I could still remember him talking in my ear, telling me help was on the way and we were going to be okay. “It was no accident.”

“I don’t understand.”

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