After the graveside service, I had to go back to my office, and Brody had to go to practice. Tomorrow morning, I was due to head up to Buffalo for the day for an interview, and I hadn’t even started my research. This time of the year, right before playoffs began, the station spent a lot of time and money gathering interviews with prospective playoff teams. Depending on who actually made it in, a lot of them would be archived and never aired. Buffalo was a long shot for a last-minute wildcard slot in the playoffs.

My desk was a mess of papers when Indie interrupted. It was already almost eight, and I had more work to do before I called it a night, but her visit was a welcome distraction anyway. She plopped down on the visitor’s chair in my office, a box in her hands.

“Come on in. I wasn’t busy.” I waved at the disaster that made me look busy. But the truth of the matter was, I couldn’t really focus. The sadness in Brody’s face, the way his voice broke as he spoke in church today, had deeply affected me. It was all I could think about.

“I made you something.”

“You made me something?”

She looked around my office. “Is there an echo in here?”

“I’ll probably regret it.” I tossed my pen onto the desk and leaned back in my chair. “But let’s see what you made.”

Indie reached into the box. “This is you.” She had constructed a stick figure of sorts. Binder clips had been snapped together in various ways to make two legs, two arms, and a body. The metal of two clips formed a neck and attached a stapler remover that acted as a head. The way the staple remover had its mouth open, with sharp prongs, made the figure look more like a roaring dinosaur with sharp teeth.

“I think you have too much time on your hands.”

“I’ve had two hours a day to fill since you haven’t been around to hang out with the last few days.” She reached into her box again and pulled out another creation. “This is Brody.” The carefully created clip art looked just like the one of me, only a full head taller.

“We look like we could be related.” I arched an eyebrow.

She ignored me and took another creation out of the box. This one was easy to identify: it was a snake sculpted out of paperclips. The body coiled around, and again, a staple remover was attached as the head. At least the fangs and open mouth seemed a little more realistic on a snake. She placed it on my desk with the other two.

“Why do you have three staple removers?”

“I don’t. I came into your office while you were in Mr. CUM’s meeting and stole the one out of your top right drawer. I saw Fred Nagel was in the meeting, too, so I stopped by his office on my way back and swiped one from him. By the way, why does his office smell like ass?”

I laughed for the first time in days. “I didn’t know it smelled.”

“You mean you haven’t sniffed the entire floor yet?”

“Shut up.”

Indie rearranged her figure art on my desk, moving the snake between Brody and me. “The snake’s name is Willow.”

“Why am I not surprised?” After the service yesterday, Indie had talked my ear off. While I was focused on Brody, Indie had been watching Willow. She was certain from the way that Willow gazed at Brody that the woman was using Brody’s sympathy to get close to him again. I didn’t know what her intentions were, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how Brody felt about her. Seeing them standing together at the church had made everything I knew about their history so much more real.

Does he still love her?

What if he wanted to give things a second chance, now that she was clean?

“You need to get in there and put an end to the walk down memory lane.”

“They just lost someone they love. They have a lot of history. If I can’t trust him to mourn with her, then I can’t trust him at all, and it’s not meant to be.”

Indie threw her hands up in the air. “That’s crap. We don’t leave everything up to fate, we fight for the shit we want.”

“What if he still loves her?”

“Then you’ll get hurt. I’ll buy you ice cream, and we’ll both gain five pounds sitting on your couch watching Nicholas Sparks movies for a month.”

I thought about it for a moment. “Will it be Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia?”

“With chocolate sauce on top.”

I took a deep breath. “He asked me to meet them for dinner tonight. They’re having dinner with some people who worked at the nursing home where Marlene lived.”

“And you said no?”

“I told him I had a lot to do before I left in the morning.”

“Like what?”

“Research.”

“On?”

“The team.”

“You know every statistic for every team in the damn NFL. Whatever you think you need to learn, you don’t.”

She was probably right. I glanced at the time on my phone. “Dinner is probably half over already.”

“Go bring him dessert.”