Feels Like Falling - Kristy Woodson Harvey Page 0,22

the end of the street, where there weren’t any houses, and scope out whether I could park and sleep there. Cops didn’t patrol the nice areas a whole lot because nothing much happened in them anyway. But when I turned my head, I did a double take.

There in Gray’s driveway was a man lying on the ground, on his stomach, a huge box beside him. There’s something that happens to a body when it seems like somebody else is in trouble. And that’s what happened to me. I threw the car in park, jumped out, and ran to him. “Should I call nine-one-one?” I screamed.

He scrambled to his feet. He was a nice-looking boy, probably around his early twenties, in jeans and a sports coat, with this big, goofy smile.

“Oh, sorry,” he said in an accent that meant he wasn’t from around here. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” He held up his arm. “One of my cuff links fell under the car and I was just looking for it.”

I put my hand up to my heart trying to slow its beating.

“I’m Trey,” he said, reaching out his hand to shake mine. “Gray’s assistant.”

I nodded. “I’m Diana.” I smirked. “The woman she got fired.”

I didn’t expect him to know what I was talking about, so I was taken aback when he said, “Ohhhh. She felt awful about that. I was on the phone with her when she was going to the store to try to get your job back.”

So, she had gone down to the drugstore. And she hadn’t called me. That couldn’t mean good news.

He picked up the box with some effort and, handing me a key, said, “Hey, do you think you could open the back door for me?”

There was something unsettling about that. “Oh, um… I don’t think it would be right.”

He smiled, his eyes gleaming. “What wouldn’t be right is for me to drop an entire case of decadent rosé.”

I looked around to see if anyone was watching, then followed him to the back door, put the key in, and turned the knob. I didn’t walk inside, but I could see towels strewn about on the pair of matching sofas on either end of the fireplace. There were cups on the side table, dishes on the coffee table.

“Good Lord,” I said.

Trey nodded. “Oh, I know. Gray is brilliant, but she’s a total slob.”

I’ve always been real picky about having everything in its place and all that, and it killed me to see this house I used to clean in such a state of disarray. I couldn’t stop myself from walking into the kitchen, where it just kept getting worse. There were dishes all stacked up in the sink, mail scattered around, some kind of fake milk still on the counter from the morning—surely spoilt now.

She was a grown woman, but she wasn’t living like it. I didn’t owe her anything. Hell, she owed me. But I can’t stand a mess. Just like my sister, Elizabeth, when I see it, I clean it. I planned just to get a handle on the dishes in the sink, but I couldn’t leave the counters like that. And then those damp towels on those white linen sofas… And Trey was coming in and out, in and out, carrying groceries and papers and saying things like, “Gray never has any food in the house,” and, “I’ll pay you a hundred bucks to clean this place so I don’t have to.”

And I needed the money, and it was kind of like when I saw Trey lying in the driveway. My body just took over, and here we were. Before I knew it, I was vacuuming and humming, totally lost in my own world. Well, lost until I looked up and saw Gray standing there with her jaw hanging open like a fish on a hook.

My face got hot. I turned the vacuum off and could hear the Van Morrison Trey had playing. He walked in, saying, “Diana, I’m trying to do the guac like you told me, but—” And then he saw Gray and stopped in his tracks too, and we were all standing there, staring like trapped animals. Almost like me, Harry, and Big Red a few hours earlier.

“I’m having a hard time deciding where to start,” Gray said. She turned to Trey. “But I guess, first, how the hell are you here so quickly?”

He smiled disarmingly at her. “I was in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot across the street when