the logistics sorted and figure out what people like the best so we know what to put in the marketing brochures.”
She sounds just like I was feeling about my blue paint. “Is it really the logistics and marketing that are worrying you?”
She looks back up, surprise in her eyes. Then they shutter.
I’ve seen that in the coffee shop, too. She’s got a willingness to travel to interesting places in a conversation—and personal lands she keeps carefully protected.
Kind of like a middle-aged artist I know.
She looks down at the tomato as she switches it from hand to hand, but her eyes come back up again before she speaks. Softly. Cautiously. Like a green tomato that wasn’t ready to leave its vine. “I’m worried that I won’t be able to make their charts matter to them as much as they matter to me.”
I step very gingerly into the private lands she’s just allowed me to see. “I get that.”
A curious eyebrow.
So many cans of worms—and such an odd desire to take their lids off. “Mabel isn’t the only ghost that I can sense or feel or sometimes see. Others come to visit. I paint them. It’s hard to let those canvases go live with people who probably just want something to match their new sofa.”
“I bet.” A quiet exhale. “I didn’t know that.”
I shrug, feeling oddly tender. “It doesn’t make it into the marketing brochures.”
Her eyes soften. “They come to you to be seen. That’s really great.”
I let a hand escape my pocket long enough to brush a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “I bet people will come to your workshops for the same reason.”
She smiles a little. “Maybe.”
Maybe, after my grocery shopping is done, I’ll go see if Violet needs any more volunteers. I nod at the tomato in Indigo’s hand. “Do you need that?”
She looks down at it like she’s never seen it before. “No, actually. But I guess I’d better buy it, now that I’ve turned it into my own personal stress ball.”
I chuckle and hold out my basket. “I need three. That one’s perfect. It looks like it can handle a sword fight.”
She grins. “You live an interesting life.”
It suddenly feels that way.
Chapter Fourteen
“You’re a Gemini. I’m sorry, but this can’t work. We would make the most annoying babies in the history of the universe.” Indigo, age 34.
INDIGO
I look down at the tomato in his basket, which is sweet and dorky and doing strange things to my insides, like he’ll be carrying home something important that I didn’t quite mean for him to have. Then I reach out to the neat stack in the produce bin and pick him out two more. Ripe ones, this time. The kind that competent adults buy at the grocery store. “Do you need anything else?”
He consults a list that looks like it got written by a doctor—while they were bleeding. “From this section, celery and apples.”
The part of me that was trying to be a competent adult gets replaced by the ten-year-old who once waved a carrot sword at her two best friends. “Do people actually eat celery?”
He glances at me, amused. “It’s for a roasted-chicken salad. It’s the first real food that Mabel ever taught me to make.”
That does strange things to my insides, too. “She makes fancy stuff.”
Drew’s lips quirk. “Only when it matters. I was trying to impress a girl.”
He laughs at himself so easily. I put the two ripe tomatoes in his basket. “Did it work?”
He looks over at the carrots and snorts.
I got used to people who talk to thin air a long time ago. “What did she say?”
He glances at me cautiously.
I shrug. “It’s a little weird. But ignoring her would feel weirder.” And he’s clearly a package deal, just like I am.
He smiles wryly. “She says that it was the wrong girl and I should ask if you like roasted chicken.”
I roll my eyes in the general direction of the carrots. “Troublemaker.”
I’m probably imagining the air that teases the ends of my hair, but it finishes the job that my Sagittarius began when she spied Drew wandering through the produce bins. I’ve been hiding in Violet’s apartment and feeling sorry for myself because my place isn’t ready yet, and that’s the wrong way to respond to a soup date that still nudges me at odd moments and tries to send my feet across the street. It’s time to see what might come of this. I badly need a more permanent nest than Violet’s