she pumped her fist hard.
Yes!
She pulled her phone back out and hit Zoe’s number.
“Zoe? Good news. Rafi’s ready to move with Excelsior and HomeAssist.” She yanked the phone away from her ear as Zoe let out a triumphant yelp. “Are you still in your office? Meet me down in the bar for a strategy session and celebratory cheese fries.”
Zoe promised to be down in ten. Beth hung up and texted Dana.
Good news at work. Will be a little late. Save me some dinner.
Getting Rafi on board with the Excelsior Fund was an enormous success, however it happened. Beth liked her position as Lumination’s BS detector. But at the same time, she itched to find out what she could do with some money of her own.
It meant putting herself in a position where she could be more publicly visible. Which was risky. Her past was still out there. As of last month, in fact, her past was sitting in a relatively nice extended-stay hotel in Perrysborough, Iowa, a little piece of nowhere near the Minnesota border. According to the last surveillance report, her past was eating a lot of pizza and ordering movies and using the ATM at the Good Neighbor’s Party Store. Which meant they were doing something for money. The hotel was a cut above their usual (at least their usual recently), and the food delivery was better than peanut butter and white bread from the quickie mart. Plus, they’d been coming and going a lot.
Probably they were still hustling drinks in the bar and cheating at pool and cards. Maybe they’d found an in at the local casino where they could get to the suckers who had just won big, or lost big. But she had no direct evidence on that. Surveillance got expensive after a while.
Her past was waiting—whether they knew it or not—for her to finally decide what to do about them.
Well, they can wait a little longer. Today belongs to me.
CHAPTER THREE
“You know, my mom won’t mind if you stay the night,” Dana Fraser said to her best friend, Chelsea Hamilton, as they pushed out of her building’s revolving door. They stood under the concrete awning to keep out of the sun. It was stupid hot. Even the breeze that funneled down the street stung her skin. “We can have a pajama party, and you can be my cupcake taster. Not like I’m doing anything else.”
Dad had promised to take Dana with the rest of his family out to Warren Dunes to celebrate the end of the school year. Except, of course, now he had backed out. She’d pretty much expected it. But she’d just kinda hoped maybe this time he’d actually follow through. He’d been talking about it for a couple of weeks, which was an eternity in Dad-time. She’d even looked up a bunch of campfire cooking recipes just in case.
“Sorry,” said Chelsea. “I really can’t. My dad got home this morning, and that means Mom wants us all sitting around the supper table pretending we want to talk to each other. And, by the way, your dad sucks.”
“He really sucks,” admitted Dana. She looked at her phone. The app showed that the Lyft was two minutes away.
The snotty kids at Pullman Prep called Dana Fraser a freak, mostly because of her different-colored eyes. To those same snots, Chelsea Hamilton was a chunk and a freak. She was tall, round bodied, and round breasted. She streaked her hair white and blue and wore Hello Kitty stockings and Doc Martens with her school uniform. They sent her home for it one time, but her mom got up in the administration’s face and they backed down.
Never mind that Mrs. Hamilton couldn’t look at Chelsea without sarcasm pouring out of every vintage-chic pore—no bunch of schoolteachers and underpaid administrators got to criticize her daughter.
“At least with Dad home, Cody can’t have band practice at our place,” Chelsea said. “He’ll be out the door as soon as Mom lets him be excused. Gott sei Dank für kleine Gef?lligkeiten,” she added. Dana remembered it meant something like “Thank God for small things.”
Chelsea took German because she’d heard that the universities there offered free tuition, even to foreign students. Four more years, she’d said, and I can tell them all to take their fucked-up lives and their trust fund and their codependent shitheadery and shove it up whatever orifice they got left, cuz I am outta there!
A red Subaru with the Lyft sticker in the window pulled up the