The Key to Fear - Kristin Cast Page 0,40

matured, and her mother continued to make comments about them, Elodie had kept the slippers. They were a memory wrapped in fuzzy pink fluff, and she wasn’t in the habit of throwing away memories.

The staircase opened to the kitchen, where Gwen impatiently drummed her fingers as she leaned against the rectangular island in the middle of the vast space. Elodie had to admit that the new flooring did look nice, or expensive, as one of Gwen’s friends had commented. And, according to her mother, expensive was the best compliment one could receive.

“Oh, Elodie.” Gwen stopped drumming and pressed her palms against her cheeks. “I would have insisted you stay at work and get yourself checked out if I’d known you weren’t feeling well.”

Elodie hid her hands in the sleeves of her sweatshirt. “I feel fine.”

“Well.” Gwen eyed her as she worried the high lace collar of her dress between her fingers. “I wish you would look a bit more,” Gwen fluffed the air, “put together. What if someone were to stop by unannounced?”

Elodie glanced down at her bunnies partially swallowed by her schlumpy gray pant legs. “I don’t think that’s something we have to worry about.” She tucked her hair behind her ears. “Let’s go to the living room so I can use the holoscreen. It’ll be easier than trying to walk you through your comlink.”

Elodie slid across the slick new marble floor till it ended at the living room threshold, where the pristine gray porcelain picked up, yawning into the expertly decorated living space. The flooring looked like wood—dreary, storm cloud–colored wood, but wood nonetheless—however, it wasn’t. It fit their house. It fit with her mother, dressed up as one thing, but something else altogether.

Text from Astrid Fujimoto.

Elodie faced her mother as the gray text screen materialized:

Been thinking about Mohawk Man.

Elodie pressed her sleeve against her mouth to hide her smile as she replied.

AND …

With a strained chuckle, Gwen batted the air. “I suppose what’s done is done.” Pink cheeked and wide eyed, she stared at Elodie expectantly.

Elodie hugged her stomach. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Gwen threw her arms into the air. “Surprise!” Her perpetual overpreparedness strangled the excitement from the word.

“There’s my girl!” Rhett popped up from behind the kitchen island, arms shooting out like the points of a star.

“Rhett?” Elodie’s stomach knotted. He’d been there the entire time, listening as her mother went on about her father and the dress and the comlink—all pretty typical for Gwen, but Astrid had been the only other person who’d heard this side of her mother. And even that was almost too much embarrassment for Elodie to handle. “Wh-What are you doing here?”

He leaned against the island, his tight white tee and closely cut white-blond hair blending almost perfectly with the row of cabinets that stretched down the wall behind him like teeth. “You said you wanted to see each other more. So here I am. You happy?”

What would you do if you weren’t already matched?

Elodie froze, guilt consuming her as her mother and fiancé stood on the other side of the block letters etched into her vision.

Gwen’s heels clapped against the floor as she hopped. “Oh, Rhett, dear, she’s excited. You just caught her off guard is all.”

Like, would you want to see him again? Meet up with him in VR?

Sweat popped against Elodie’s forehead and she shook her head and refocused, “From our talk earlier, you …” She picked at a stray thread hanging from the cuff of her sweatshirt. “I thought you were fine with the way things were.”

With an annoyed grunt, Rhett folded his arms across his chest. “Look, El, I can go.” The hard angles of his jaw, his thick, trunk-like neck, and the commanding timbre of his voice made him seem much older than his twenty-one years.

Flapping her arms like a crazed goose, Gwen scooted behind him. From her gestures, anyone else would’ve thought she needed medical assistance, but Elodie understood her mother’s panicked waving. And Gwen was right. Elodie was being difficult yet again, which her mother understood would chase Rhett away. And no one, Elodie included, wanted Rhett to submit a request to have their match terminated. She’d be viewed as defective, and no one would want her then. Although, at times, that sounded divine.

“You’re the one who wanted us to spend more time together,” Rhett continued. “But if you don’t want to hang out with your own fiancé …”

Or what about in the real? Would you want to talk