by Nic Joseph
“What are you doing here?” she asked from across the room, making both the woman and the man sitting beside me look up. “Couldn’t sleep?”
I shook my head, strangely embarrassed, and took another sip of the tea.
Vanessa filled the woman’s glass and then walked over and perched on the stool beside me, setting the pitcher down between us. “Did you try David’s cheesecake and wine trick?”
“No,” I said with a laugh. “We don’t just keep cheesecake in the fridge, first of all—”
“Why not?” she asked.
“—and second,” I said, ignoring her, “it’s not really a trick, is it? It’s just getting drunk and eating dessert before falling asleep.”
“Best trick I’ve ever heard of,” she said.
I’d met Vanessa three years ago when Keith and I first moved into our house. I’d started going to the diner on a regular basis, and we’d clicked instantly. She’d talked to me about her crazy ex, Terry; her hilarious family; and her borderline obsession with celebrities. I talked to her about Keith and the drama of our small circle of friends, who Vanessa called the “la-di-d’artists.” At thirty-six, Vanessa was only a year younger than me, but people often thought she was in her mid- to late twenties, with her smooth, youthful skin and short, curly brown hair. But it was more than just her looks. She was a fireball of personality, bold, funny, and refreshingly honest, qualities that had helped me get through some of the roughest moments after Keith’s accident.
“How was your night driving sixteen-year-olds to house parties?” she asked.
I smiled. “Fine. Uneventful. Which means it was a great night, actually.”
“What time is your shift today?” she asked.
“I’ll be back in at noon.”
“And after that?”
I frowned. She already knew the answer to that—I was going to do what I did every day after I left the diner—which could only mean she had other plans for me. “I’ll probably drive for a few hours…” I said slowly.
As I expected, she shook her head. “No,” she said. “You need to take the night off.”
I sighed. “I’m fine—” I started, ready to launch into a lie about how I’d gotten a little sleep when I went home and that I’d try to nap again before my shift.
But Vanessa shook her head again. “No, not for you,” she said. “Look, I know anything I say about your health and how you’re running yourself into the ground working here and driving DAC every night, though totally valid arguments, won’t work. So I’m not going down that route. Forget that. You need to take the night off for me.”
“For you.”
“Yup. We’re going to a party.” She drew out the last word and leaned forward, shimmying a little as she said this.
I heard a chuckle and turned to see the guy eating eggs looking over at us. I reached over to grab the pitcher of cold water and poured some on top of the tea bag in my mug.
“A party?” I asked. “You mean like those sixteen-year-olds I spend my nights dropping off?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’d ask somebody else, someone who won’t take as much convincing as you’re going to, but then I remember that my only other friend is my teenage daughter, and she doesn’t need to see what I’m about to shell out tonight.”
I almost choked on my water. “I’m not sure I need to either.”
She grinned. “Oh, yes you do.”
“I don’t.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” a voice behind me said, and we both turned to see Eggs staring at us with a smile on his face.
“Of course, you wouldn’t,” Vanessa said without missing a beat before turning her attention back to me. “Anyway, come on! Like I said, do it for me.”
I sighed. “I don’t know,” I said. “We really need the money.”
“I know you do, but one night off from driving DAC isn’t going to make or break the bank,” she said, leaning forward. “Come on, Paula. It’s at that new restaurant, Agave. Tim—met him online, don’t ask, don’t judge—is hosting it. He said he could put us on ‘the list.’ Doesn’t that sound sexy? I think a night out would be good for you.”
“I thought you weren’t going to pretend this is about me.”
“I wasn’t. Then I started feeling desperate,” Vanessa said, and I smiled. She leaned in. “What’s that? Does that smile mean you’re thinking about it?”
I shook my head. “I don’t—”
“Look, you need to go out. We both do. We’re going.”
“Ness—”
But she picked up the water pitcher and hopped off the stool. “Everyone,” she said, turning to face the room. “Sorry to interrupt, but this here is my good friend Paula, and she’s going through a pretty tough time right now. So we’re going out. I’m going to meet cute guys, and she’s going to get drunk. We haven’t been out in over a year. Don’t you think we deserve it?”
The group of young girls looked over and responded affirmatively, pounding the table with their hands.
“Hell yeah!” one of them said.
The older woman sitting by herself smiled slightly, and Eggs watched with a gleeful, albeit sketchy expression.
David had walked out of the back and was watching Vanessa with an amused smile on his face. He turned to me and raised one corner of his mouth.
“I don’t think you’re getting out of this one,” he said. “Sounds to me like you’re going out tonight.”
• • •
As I walked home from the diner, I had to admit that I was just a little bit excited. Vanessa was right that it had been over a year since we’d done anything like that, and it would be good to take a night off.
It was exhausting—the long shifts at the diner, driving people all across the city, going home to take care of Keith, and getting up to do it all over again. But I didn’t have a choice. My mother had been diagnosed with lung cancer when I was nine years old, and I’d witnessed firsthand what illness could do to a family. The anger, the depression, the ever-present sadness that hung in the air—those things took a toll on even the strongest of couples, and my parents were no exception. Whereas some people were able to come together during tough times, my mother and father had retreated to their own corners of the world through what, I’ve realized with age and time, was probably a little bit both their faults. Four years after her diagnosis, when my mother’s cancer was in remission, the relationship ended, along with the family and structure I’d always assumed would be forever.
Still, all that being said, Vanessa was right.
One night off wasn’t going to make that much of a difference.
Not for the bills.
Not for the back payments we owed on the house.
And not for…
The surgery.
Keith and I would be meeting with his doctor, Ruby Bryant, tomorrow. She would most likely say that he was doing okay in therapy, but his chances of regaining full mobility in his legs were still slim to none. Then she would ask us to take note of any changes and if we had any questions.
Somehow, before the conversation was over, she’d manage to mention the surgery.
At first, like Keith, I’d been angry at her for bringing it up when we couldn’t have it, couldn’t even come close to affording it. She’d gone to medical school with a man named Christian Reveno, now a surgeon in Paris. Dr. Reveno had developed a new technique that involved transplanting cells from other parts of the body into the spine, which was showing some signs of success, at least in the limited trials that had been conducted.
The cost of the trips back and forth to Paris and the treatment would run us close to $180,000.
It should’ve been a no-brainer. We could never afford that.
But somewhere along the way, as the months went by and the barrage of treatments and therapies we tried didn’t help, I starte
d to wonder, what if?
What if we could afford to fly to Paris and meet with Dr. Reveno?
What if the twelve case studies he’d published online were all true?
What if it worked for Keith?
What if we could have our lives back?
I think Dr. Bryant would’ve let it go if I hadn’t started asking more and more questions about it.
If it works, he’d be able to walk again?
Yes.
Run?
Maybe.
Swim?
That, I don’t know.
But there would be more than a three percent chance.
Yes. Much more.
And just as soon as we’d start talking about it, Keith would get upset and demand to know why we were still discussing a treatment we couldn’t afford. One that couldn’t be “won through lottery tickets or pieced together from DAC fares,” he’d told me once in a conversation-turned-argument.
“It’s like it’s all you can think about,” he’d said. “Finding ways to scrape money out of couch cushions so that we can afford to make me better. Has it occurred to you that I don’t want you doing that?”
“Why not?” I’d asked. “Dr. Bryant said—”
“I don’t care what Dr. Bryant said!” he had said. “I am so damned tired of talking about this. We can’t afford it. Please, Paula, just let it go.”
We didn’t talk about it much after that, but I hadn’t let it go. In fact, it had become almost an obsession, a pipe dream I couldn’t shake. Because if all that separated us from the life we once had—the one where we rolled around in bed on Saturday mornings and drank whiskey cocktails for fun, not straight from the bottle to go to sleep—was $180,000, then I would search every couch cushion and pick up every DAC I could find.
I would do whatever it took.
In fact, as I neared our apartment building after leaving the diner, I stopped next to my car where I’d parked it on the street a few hours earlier.
Unlocking it, I opened the back door and leaned inside, letting my hand brush the cushion of the back seat.
I did this once or twice a day, looking for loose change, jewelry, wallets, or anything else of value. People left the most ridiculous things in DACs, and it was surprising how few actually followed up for them.
The seat was empty, and I was about to slam the door when the streetlight bounced off something on the mat behind the passenger seat.
I leaned in to pick up the item and actually pumped my fist in the air when I saw what it was.
A phone.
A nice phone.
I had a two-week rule with phones. If nobody contacted me within that window, I put it up for sale online and acted like it had never happened. I’d done it twice already and made seventy-five bucks each time.
This was who I was now.
I sold things online that did not belong to me.
I walked around to my trunk and opened it, tossing the phone into the small bin I kept there for just that purpose. I hoped I wouldn’t have to take it out again until it was time to sell it.
As I slammed it shut, I wondered if the phone belonged to Lotti.
I imagined him calling the phone and the sound of his warm, deep voice flowing through the line as he asked me where I found it and how he could get it back.
I quickly pushed the thought away. As nice as it was to think about hearing his voice again, I’d be much luckier if he didn’t call.
I could probably get at least a hundred for it.
Chapter 3
Claire
The Night in Question
A few hours before she got the call about the body in the Gold Coast, Detective Claire Puhl was at a bar on a Tinder date.
She wouldn’t admit it to anyone—not her meddling mother and certainly not her overly familiar coworkers—but that’s where she was and what she was doing.
Later, she would walk into the scene of the crime as the formidable Detective Puhl, wearing the blazer and the lower, more sensible heels she kept in the back seat of her car. She would set the scene into motion, questioning the first responders and neighbors in her quiet, assertive way. She dealt with people who had the audacity to end another person’s life; she didn’t have time for anything short of scrappy, determined professionalism. She would walk in, and she would get answers, because that’s what Detective Puhl did.
But at eight o’clock that evening, she was just Claire.
Forty-one years old, nervous, and on a date with an accountant named Bill. She’d stood in the mirror a long time before leaving the house, examining the completely out-of-character bright-pink blush on her toffee-colored skin and the plum lipstick that kept getting on her teeth. It had been raining all night, and she had considered using that as an excuse to cancel, but she’d decided against it. So she was pushing small pieces of asparagus around her plate with the tip of her fork while Bill talked ad nauseam about things she already knew from his dating profile.
He “liked sports” but could only name teams, not players.
He “read books sometimes” but could only tell her genres, not titles.
He “worked out when he had time,” which was, quite simply, a damned lie.
All that aside, Bill seemed nice enough. He didn’t look very much like his pictures on the app—he was skinnier and considerably less attractive—but then again, they never did. His profile had included the words Chicago’s Idris Elba, and that should’ve been her first big hint of the disappointments to come.
Claire didn’t understand the tendency to oversell. In fact, she tended to do the opposite. She chose to upload photos that were slightly less attractive than she was in real life. She could handle not being contacted in the first place, but she’d be damned if she had to deal with disappointment that she didn’t measure up to the pictures she posted online.
Bill was on his third Jack and apple juice and telling a story about his ex-wife, a story he never should have started. Claire was trying hard to focus instead of plotting her escape.
“Mara was a real go-getter, and now she’s a cop, just like you,” Bill said. “I think that’s one of the reasons why your profile caught my attention. I guess I’m just used to, you know, dealing with women in law enforcement.”
Claire speared a piece of asparagus and looked up at the word dealing. She bit her lip. It was only the second red flag (the apple juice had been the first), and she tried to remain open-minded. She was working hard on not writing men off too soon, since every single person in her life seemed to think she wrote men off too soon.
“It’s all those romantic comedies you watch,” her mother, Elaine, had said more times than Claire could count, spitting out the words with her heavy Jamaican accent. “You want everything to be roses. That’s what you expected from law school too.”
It always came back to the lawyer thing. Always. There was no misfortune, no disappointment that Elaine Puhl couldn’t tie back to the fact that Claire had graduated from University of Chicago Law and spent just three years practicing before deciding that it wasn’t for her.
Claire had loved that her life’s work centered around seeking justice in what often felt like an unbearably unjust world. But the law had tied her hands too much. So much was out of her control by the time the cases came her way.
Joining the Chicago Police Department had been the best decision of her life. Police work had given her a way to get closer to the crimes and the people who committed them. In the fourteen years since she had left law to become a detective, Claire had never once looked back.
Elaine Puhl, on the other hand, had made a career of looking back.
“I just don’t understand how you could put that much time and effort into something and walk away from it so easily,” she’d said once. Even though it had been more than a decade, she still found ways to weave it into co
nversations.
Lately, she’d switched gears to focus on why Claire hadn’t found anyone to settle down with yet.
“It’s because you’re too picky,” her mother had said. “You have to stop judging men so harshly. Like how you judged being a lawyer before you even had a chance to get settled in the field.”
Two hours after she and Bill had sat down, Claire was down to the final bites of her asparagus, and she put her fork down. It was a little after ten o’clock. He’d ordered slowly and ate even slower, and the restaurant had started to clear out. She didn’t want to finish first; she wouldn’t know what to do with her hands. But Bill had been talking almost nonstop, and he’d barely made a dent in his brick chicken.
“Can I just say that you’re really pretty, and I really like this whole ‘natural’ look you have going on?” he asked, leaning forward, rolling a tightly coiled tendril of hair near her temple between his fingers. Claire jerked back in her seat, but he didn’t seem to notice. “I’ll be honest, that’s really how I prefer my women. Looks like you just rolled out of bed. It’s kind of hot…”
Strike three.
If she were honest with herself, Claire had known from the minute he had walked in that he probably wasn’t “the one.” She had met a lot of men in her life, and she’d become fairly skilled at determining which ones had potential and which ones were more likely to have major life regrets.
Now, as she sat across from him, she was ready to go, tired of having to try so hard, and tired of feeling less confident than she was in almost every other part of her life. There was too much to prove on these dates.
She didn’t have anything to prove at work.
In fact, she had solved every single case she’d taken on in the last ten years.
It wasn’t something she bragged about, at least not often. It was worth noting, however, that there were very few detectives who held the same record on her team, and she was the only woman in that position. It took focus, dedication, and, above all, a complete commitment to seeing every case through from start to finish.
When Claire Puhl took aim, she didn’t miss.
