know the saying ‘I’d follow you to hell and back’? Garrett really did!” Have I mentioned I loved this timeline’s Garrett? Quiet, but cool under pressure, and utterly reliable.
Laura had been quietly sipping her smoothie and not contributing much to the conversation. This was cool by me, since I was definitely the hero of this story and was happy to explain that to anyone who wanted to listen. It had been a long few days. I didn’t blame her for being drained, poor kid.
“No,” Garrett said again. He’d brought his knitting bag into the kitchen and was having Antonia help him roll yarn. Which I never understood at all. The yarn comes in a nice wrapped-up little package . . . which the knitter then unwraps. Then rewraps into a ball. Dumb. I could feel myself slipping into a boredom-induced coma just thinking about it. “You didn’t promise.”
“Uh-huh, sure, anyway, then the devil was all ‘hey, bitch, you can’t do that to me in my own waiting room’ and I was all ‘so call a cop, jerk’ and—wait. What?”
“You didn’t.”
Now we were all looking at him in surprise, even Antonia.
“It’s not what you did, it’s what I did,” Garrett said, idly rolling eggplant purple yarn into an eggplant purple ball. “When Betsy came back—when she didn’t remember Jessica being pregnant and didn’t remember I was alive, I lied. She doesn’t want to think she’s a bad person, so she helped. But she didn’t.” He looked at me for a half second, a casual glance before pausing to root around in his knitting bag. “She didn’t promise.”
If he’d blown up, we couldn’t have been more shocked. Garrett saying more than a sentence or two at a time was hard to wrap our minds around. To think that quickly . . . come up with a plan . . . execute the plan . . . and lie? It was almost unthinkable.
“I . . . I . . . I . . .” I hate the new Garrett! I sat there staring like a goldfish. “I have no idea how to react to this.”
(Privately. React privately. You and I will discuss this later, my own. At length.) Sinclair’s voice in my head was grim and cool, but he kept a pleasant expression on his face as he watched Garrett. Sometimes I loved this telepathy stuff.
(I don’t know what . . . you know what? I don’t even know what to think about this, never mind what to do.)
(Privately. At length.)
I casually picked up my smoothie and nodded. Damn right, privately at length. I didn’t mind being tricked . . . okay, that wasn’t true, I did mind. I mind that Garrett could lie, and do it so well no one questioned his word.
“Hey, Marc hasn’t come back down yet. You know he’s gonna make me play back all the gossip for him if he misses it.”
“I think he’s trying to grab some shut-eye . . . he volunteered to pull a double tonight.”
“You want to—” I got up and grabbed an empty glass from the dish strainer, held it out to Jessica, and she carefully filled it with our new flavor experiment, blueberry-banana-and-more-blueberries. Sinclair was such a freak for strawberries, we were glad to have some variety. “I’ll run this up to him. If he’s snoozing, I can just throw it back in the freezer.”
“Tell him he can have the Mystery Machine for the weekend. He met somebody,” she said to the group. “He wants to head up to Superior for a couple of days.”
“Good for him,” I said, pleased. Marc’s social life usually sucked rocks. I was glad he’d put himself out there again. Let me say for the zillionth time: how had he not found some great guy and settled down with a white picket fence to raise beagle puppies and pick fights with Superior Court rulings on gay marriage? That sounded like a pretty great happily-ever-after to me.
And Marc deserved it more than most. I always understood why he’d become a doctor . . . it was hard to imagine him doing anything else. Or being anything else. It was a cliché, but he was a giver. He was never happier than when a situation was improved (hysterical roommates with boy trouble, hysterical fourth grader with a scalp laceration, hysterical vampire queen in a Louboutin-less timeline) by his presence.
It didn’t take long to get to his room—he was a floor above Sinclair and me, in a little-used section of