It Wasn't Always Like This - Joy Preble Page 0,3

way their closeness reminded her of a closeness she’d once had.

Coral tapped a painted nail on her chin. “Look at her, Hugo. We could be. . .

“Sisters,” Hugo and she f inished at the same time. They giggled.

Bernie nudged Emma’s hand, then signed happily as she stroked his head.

“Seriously, though,” Coral went on, “if I let my hair go back to its own color, which I totally won’t—but if I did . . . Don’t we look alike, Hugo?”

He nodded.

Emma shrugged. “Maybe.” She rolled her eyes to make it not true. But it was true. And acknowledging that—even silently—awakened in her a f ierce and sudden protectiveness she hadn’t been able to quell since. So she told Coral and Hugo that she was a freshman at Brookhaven Community College studying for a nursing degree. It was the lie she’d chosen for herself upon moving to Dallas.

But occasionally, she’d wished that this were true: that she was studying to become someone who could maybe save a life.

Unfortunate that Coral and Hugo had chosen last night—of all nights—to sneak into that same neighborhood bar.

But that’s what happened when you made friends. You ran into them.

Emma kept one eye on the guy she’d followed, and the other on Matt, whom she matched bourbon for bourbon. She didn’t indulge that often, but it was the holidays, and he was cute enough. Besides, the guy she’d followed, one of Elodie Callahan’s classmates, seemed to be guilty only of a bad fake ID. Like she’d f igured: a dead-end. And the bourbon was reminding Emma that at the end of the day—in point of fact, a century of days—she was still alone in all this.

A potent combination.

She should have left the moment Coral and Hugo sauntered in. Or told them to leave. They were underage, after all. She didn’t. Among a long list of reasons why: they thought she was underage, too. (In a way, she was.) And cute-enough Matt? He thought otherwise. Better to let sleeping dogs lie. Or sit on your foot, like Bernie.

“You like him,” Coral whispered to Emma after bourbon number four. Or f ive. “Don’t you?” Coral was a romantic like that.

“He’s all right,” Emma whispered back.

“You’re cute, too,” Matt said, leaning across Emma to wink at Coral. He’d heard them, obviously. Then he pressed his mouth close to Emma’s ear. It had been a long time since she’d felt a boy’s lips brush her skin. “But not as cute as you.”

She should have known better. She did know better. Just sometimes . . .

At least Coral and Hugo hadn’t stayed long. A party somewhere, Coral said, eyes bright—and then they were gone. Emma told her to have a nice holiday if she didn’t see her; Emma was going to be spending it with some of her fellow nursing students, studying for their practicums. (Translation: investigating why a girl named Elodie Callahan had been murdered.)

It was just Emma and Matt after that, his arm draped casually over her shoulders, and some mixture of anthem rock and Christmas songs . . . and four or f ive bourbons too many. Matt was not Charlie. Could never be Charlie. But Matt was there. Sometimes there was enough.

And now here they were.

“I don’t have coffee,” Emma said to move things along. She did in fact have coffee, two neatly stored packages in the side door of the fridge: Dunkin Donuts dark roast and a vanilla-f lavored one from Whole Foods. She liked them mixed half and half. In Portland, she’d favored espresso. Dallas seemed to require something sweeter. And as soon as Matt was out the door, she would brew a pot. She would sip a mug on her little balcony while she scribbled notes, and she would decide if there was anything about the Elodie Callahan case worth pursuing. Anything she might have missed.

“You look awfully young,” Matt said. He stood slowly, frowning, a thin wrinkle furrowing his brow.

Matt was not young. Not old, either, but somewhere in the middle. Surely no more than thirty.

“I’m twenty-one,” Emma said. It was the age on her current ID, basically the youngest possible age to be licensed and accepted without suspicion as a private investigator in the state of Texas, though eighteen was the off icial minimum. Besides, the age on her driver’s license was even true, from a certain perspective. She had def initely lived twenty-one years. And as far as the other minimum requirements to be licensed as both a driver and private investigator—she’d