“Hannah! I wasn’t…” Common sense finally broke through his panic. “Are you taking the piss?”
She sniffed and looked away. But not quite fast enough to hide her smirk.
“Oh, Jesus Christ, woman.” He slapped a hand to his chest. “Don’t do that.”
Her huff of laughter was almost a genuine, honest-to-God chuckle. “Don’t make it so easy, then.”
“I thought you were actually upset! I thought you were going to murder me in my sleep or—or cry.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I’d never cry.”
Which is how Nate learned that he could go from agonising over his mother and battling a migraine to pissing himself with laughter in under half an hour. The key, it turned out, was Hannah Kabbah.
8
Zach: Want to get a drink?
Hannah: No.
Zach: Want to eat cookies and bitch about people?
Hannah: Meet you at the park in twenty minutes.
“Orange.”
“No. Yellow.”
“Orange.”
“Yellow!”
“Guys,” Nate sighed, looking up from his coffee. “No arguing before 8 a.m. please.”
Josh apparently took that as a challenge. “But the sun,” he growled, “is yellow!”
“It is not!” Beth snapped. “Because I saw a picture of the sun on the board yesterday, and Mrs. Clarke said astronauts took it, and the sun was on fire and it was orange!”
“I HAVE SEEN THE SUN,” Josh bellowed, “AND IT IS YELLOW!”
“The sun,” Hannah said firmly, “is a ball of burning gas.” As always, the sound of her low, steady voice made the kids magically shut up.
Nate sipped his coffee and decided that, since he hadn’t slept in two days, she could take this one. Why she was up at all, he had no idea, but he wasn’t about to complain. He suspected she was awake just to help him, because she knew he was tired. But she’d certainly never say that, and he was grateful for it.
“Since it’s burning,” Hannah said, “that essentially makes it a ball of fire. I propose, therefore, that to solve this argument, we set something on fire.”
It was a mark of Hannah’s all-round brilliance that he didn’t automatically spit out his coffee. Also, that his kids had apparently learned the definitions of essentially, propose, and therefore some time in the last few weeks. Because he certainly hadn’t taught them.
The kids burst into predictable cheers, their bad humour forgotten. But Nate, despite his pretty extensive trust in Hannah, couldn’t stop himself from catching her eye and croaking, “Fire?”
“After school,” she said calmly, “and under controlled conditions.”
He snorted. “I’m assuming that’s my job.”
“Obviously that’s your job. Something tells me you have plenty of experience setting things alight.” While he tried to figure out if that was an insult, she added primly, “I will supervise.”
“Supervise, huh?”
“Yes. The kids can draw the flames. We’ll make it a science project. They can write a letter about it, and we’ll send the whole thing into school. The teachers will be so impressed, they’ll decide that the Davis children are hardworking, intelligent, and come from a nice family. So next time Beth loses her temper and kicks someone, or Josh zones out on a whole afternoon of classes, they’ll be treated sympathetically.”
Nate stared. Blinked. Stared some more. “Your mind is…”
“Terrifying,” she finished, rifling through one of the cupboards. “So I’ve been told.”
“Actually, I was going to say brilliant.”
She looked over at him sharply, as if to catch him smirking behind her back or something. But Nate was just drinking his coffee and thanking God for her existence, and she must’ve seen that on his face. Slowly, the suspicion in her eyes fading, she turned back to the cupboard.
And then, a moment later, she screamed.
It was a very Hannah scream, of course. More of a tiny, muted screech, actually. The kids didn’t even notice it over their back-and-forth about the best flavour of jam to put in porridge. But Nate heard it as if she’d screamed right into his ear, and not just because his head was pounding like an anvil.
He was next to her in seconds, moving so fast he poured half his coffee onto the floor. “What? What is it?”
She was staring into the cupboard like she’d just found a corpse in there. But when he looked over her shoulder, all he could see were cereal boxes, a few of which had fallen over, and…
Oh. She’d found his money. Some of it, anyway.
“Nate,” she hissed, “why the hell do you have…” She poked the stack of cash gingerly, as if it might bite. “Jesus. Are those fifties? What is that, like, ten grand?”