Before I could protest, she led me toward the stairs.
Maybe I should have been surprised to find the Last Picks in the servants’ dining room, but I wasn’t. Fox looked at me soberly. Millie had a bewildering, red-eyed hopefulness. And Keme glowered at me, apparently under the assumption that I had, as usual, screwed everything up. He wasn’t wrong. They looked like they’d been picking at the cakes Indira had made in a frenzy of worry-baking (we’d gone from five cakes to ten, so she’d been busy while I was gone, and I spotted a pumpkin trifle that, if I’d been feeling better, I would have attacked like a cartoon piranha.)
After planting me in a seat, Indira headed for the kitchen.
“What happened?” Millie asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think he and West might have broken up, but he’s—he’s not in a good place. He didn’t want to talk.”
Millie nodded and immediately started crying again.
Keme doubled down on his glower.
“You did a kind thing,” Fox said.
I thought of the fight I’d picked with Bobby. The argument. My insistence that he shouldn’t let his problems with West blow over. My smile had a lot of sharp edges when I asked, “Did I?”
“Yes, you did. Bobby shouldn’t be alone tonight.”
I nodded.
In a surprisingly kind voice, Fox added, “And whatever happened between Bobby and West, it’s not your fault.”
“It feels like it is.”
“I’m sure it does. But you might ask Bobby, after some time has passed, what he thinks. My guess is that he’ll tell you the same thing the rest of us will: that we all need friends who will tell us the truth. Especially the hard truths.”
Which I agreed with, in theory, although I’d have preferred not to be the one with the hard truths.
Keme broke through my thoughts by saying, “Like, for example, you’re an idiot.”
“What did I do now?” I asked.
Keme looked at Millie, who was wiping her eyes with a napkin.
“Millie,” I said. “It’s okay. Bobby’s going to be all right, and West will be all right. People break up all the time. They’ll get over it.”
“I know,” she said, but she was crying harder. “That’s what makes it so sad.”
I had no idea how to respond to that, but before I had to, Indira returned from the kitchen. Along with the promised eight-cheese pasta, she was carrying one of her sheet pan dinners—chicken thighs roasted with a medley of vegetables (I noticed approvingly an abundance of potatoes). It smelled amazing. It looked amazing. And, best of all, it wasn’t soup. (For whatever reason, autumn brings out people’s latent soup-making tendencies. For, like, three months, I have to be on high alert.)
I didn’t feel hungry, but as soon as I started eating, I was ravenous. Keme made a face. Fox rolled their eyes. Millie was apparently so fascinated (probably like the viewers of Animal Planet) that she forgot about crying.
Indira eyed me and then said to Fox, “It’s flattering, but I was almost positive there were bones in those chicken thighs.”
“Maybe he’ll choke,” Fox said with disturbing optimism.
I paused my chicken-devouring long enough to say, “Change of subject.”
“We still can’t find Ali Rivas,” Millie said. “Keme and I looked everywhere.”
I had to pause again. “What?”
“We checked her apartment, we checked the student union building, we checked EVERYWHERE.”
Fox discreetly held up two fingers and mouthed, Two places.
I wanted to point out that Ali’s disappearance—like so much about her that I’d heard over the last few days—simply didn’t make sense. Instead, I went for “We don’t need to find Ali—”
“Of course we do,” Indira said. “Someone murdered that man, and even though he was a terrible human being, that’s not right.”
Fox nodded. “And it’ll be a loose thread if we don’t. Can you imagine if they ended an episode of Law & Order that way? Oh wait—they did! No, did they?”
“I have no idea what’s happening right now,” I said as I brushed aside parsnip and red onion to get at another piece of perfectly roasted potato. “But this isn’t an episode of Law & Order, and it’s not our responsibility to find whoever killed Gerry.”
“But you LOVE catching killers,” Millie said—unnecessarily, in my opinion.
“No,” I said. “I don’t. I love minding my own business. I love naps. I love—isn’t there a German word for when you lie around in your pajamas all day and eat pretzels?”
Keme gave Fox a look.
“It’s called self-delusion,” Fox explained. “People are capable of tremendous amounts of it. It gets worse the older you get.”
“I’m not delusional,” I began. “I’m perfectly aware—”
And then I stopped.
Because I saw it.
