as “not very big,” but which looks huge to Kenzie. She’s never lived in any place larger than nine hundred square feet, which was the size of the bungalow she grew up in.
She hears a crunch behind her and whirls around, her heart leaping into her throat. She fully expects to find predatorial eyes shining at her in the darkness, but there’s only a squirrel peering at her from the base of a tree, its tail twitching. The street is dead. But she can’t shake the feeling that she isn’t alone.
It’s ridiculous, of course. She’s drunk, and it’s making her paranoid, and those are the two biggest reasons she should not be doing this.
Kenzie isn’t supposed to know the code to their front door. She learned it by accident. A few months back, she and Derek were on their way to the airport to catch their flight to New York. Right as they were about to get onto the freeway, he realized he didn’t have his wallet. He’d stuck it in his gym bag, which, as far as he knew, was back at home. He told the driver of the town car to turn around.
As they’d neared his street, Derek leaned over to her and brushed the hair off her face. Kenzie thought he was going to kiss her, but instead he whispered in her ear, “Babe. Do you mind slouching down?”
“What?” she whispered back.
“You know, stealth mode.” Derek forced a laugh, as if she were a child and this was fun, and they were just playing a game. She could see the driver’s eyes peering at them in the rearview mirror. He probably thought they were an odd pair. He’d picked up Derek first, here at the house in the fancy Capitol Hill neighborhood, then picked up Kenzie outside a shabby apartment building in the U District. Maybe she should have felt grateful that Derek had bothered to pick her up at all. He could have asked her to meet him at the airport.
There was no way to protest without making it a bigger deal than it needed to be. Kenzie slouched down in the leather seat. The driver pulled into the driveway. As soon as Derek got out, she sat straight up in defiance, feeling the driver’s eyes judging her in the rearview mirror. She watched through the car’s tinted windows as Derek entered the code for the front door. She had a clear view of the keypad, and she watched his fingers press 1-1-2-0. November 20. His son’s birthday.
The longer Kenzie stands in the rain, the more she sobers up, and she’s not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Derek’s house is two stories, with large windows, and flanked on both sides by enormous oak and maple trees. A deep front porch spans its width. Lush, well-tended bushes add a bright pop of color to the earthy, neutral colors of the home’s exterior. It’s not an ostentatious house, nor is it one of those modern, gaudy McMansions springing up in other neighborhoods where new money reigns. This is a family home in Capitol Hill.
Apparently, Derek and Marin got the house for a steal during the housing market crash. Over a decade later, he’d still been puffed with pride as he recounted for her the story of how he’d lowballed the previous owners, who were on the verge of foreclosure due to some shady financing deal they’d arranged to buy the house in the first place.
“Didn’t you feel bad about that?” Kenzie had asked him. “It was such a tough time for everyone.”
Derek snorted. “You’re cute. In every negotiation, someone wins, and someone loses. They couldn’t afford the house to begin with. They were part of the problem.”
This is crazy, of course. If Kenzie is going to do this, she’d better move fast, and she’d better commit to it. No second-guessing, no panicking. She walks across the street, directly to the front door. The exterior is well-lit. If stopped by a neighbor, she’s prepared to say that she works for Marin at one of the salons and is just dropping something off.
But as far as she can tell, nobody sees her. The alcohol in her system is making it hard to concentrate, but she manages to enter the four-digit code into the pin pad: 1-1-2-0. The pin pad clicks. She twists the lock, pushes the handle, and just like that, she’s inside. She shuts the door behind her, locking it again.