Chapter Eleven

Annabel

The world is caving in.

I leap from my bed with a shriek. On the way my feet get tangled in the comforter, and I tumble into the center of my tiny bedroom. My head misses the sharp corner of the nightstand. “No!” I cry, wrenching myself free of the comforter.

Another crashing sound comes then, and something shatters in the living room. Am I still dreaming? No, because the dream I was having heavily involved Beau Bennett and some amazing things he could do with his hands. “What is happening?” I shout. Wait, what time is it? I was dreaming, and I don’t remember hearing my alarm. Sunlight is streaming in through my window. Streaming. Not like the early morning, either. Oh no.

I’m late for work and the apocalypse is happening in my apartment. Or I’m being robbed. Which is it?

I grab my phone from the death trap of a bedside table and clutch it in my fist, trying to clear my head. That dream was a good dream, and my body is still struggling to get back to it, even during this legitimate emergency.

I press the home button on my iPhone. The screen takes a second to light up, since the thing is two generations old, but when it does, nine forty-five hovers on the screen in those lovely white letters. I suck in a breath through my front teeth. Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.

That settles that. If I’m being robbed, I’m not going to cower in here while the rest of my life gets destroyed in the living room. “Whoa,” a man’s voice echoes down the hall.

I wrench open the door and burst into the hallway, still in my shorts and tank from last night.

“Shit, dude,” a man says from the middle of my living room, and then he backs up in sight of the hallway. His blue uniform is covered in white powder.

White powder?

He stares up at the ceiling of the living room and puts a hand to his baseball cap.

“Hey!” I shout. The guy wheels around, the color draining from his face. No—it’s more powder.

“Dale, we’ve got a resident.” He says it in the same way they’d say we’ve got a murder on one of those crime shows.

Dale pops his head into the hallway, utterly baffled. “Miss, are you all right?”

“Is my apartment all right?” I’m trying to keep my voice steady, but this isn’t exactly a comforting sight.

“Not . . . exactly,” Dale says.

I take a couple of steps toward the two of them, and both hold up their hands and launch into a chorus that sounds like waitwaitnodon’tcomeanycloserstaybackwait.

“Not a chance,” I tell them with a glare, striding toward the living room, head held high. “What am I going to do, stay in my bedroom all day? I have work, and—” I cross the threshold into the living room and stop dead. “Oh.”

The three of us face the giant hole in the ceiling together. There’s a midcentury green armchair in the center of the living room. It flattened our IKEA table. The chair, and all the plaster underneath it.

“Yeah,” Dale says. “So, that happened.”

*****

My hands are still trembling an hour later on the train to work. I stared up at my apartment for a while, then got myself together. “You two. You call whoever you need to call. I’m going to call my roommate.”

Cynthia was not happy to receive that phone call, but I rushed her off the line. Back in my bedroom, I pulled a clean outfit from my closet—dark-blue skinny jeans with enough stretch to let me bend over a sewing machine all day, and a black tee. I have about nine of these T-shirts. It makes doing the laundry easy. I hesitated over the single high-quality tank top I own. Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself. So you texted Beau last night. That doesn’t mean he’s going to be waiting for you at the front door of the Pearl.

I wanted to say more last night, but I didn’t. I don’t know why I held back. Was it because of Kinsey, or did I lose my nerve. There’s jumping in with both feet, and then there’s jumping in over your head.

His text comes in while I’m between messages from Cynthia, who has moved on to the denial phase of this disaster.

Is it getting ahead of myself if I ask you to grab coffee at lunch?

I lean my head against the back of the seat. Lunch? Ha. I’m about to show up for work several hours late. Marilee only believed my excuse because I snapped a few pictures with my phone and sent them to her before I called.

No time . . . I’m late for work. Ceiling emergency.

Ceiling emergency?

It’s a long story.

My phone rings in my hand, Beau’s name on the screen. My stomach does a flip-flop that seems pleasant somehow.

I answer.

“What kind of emergency can a ceiling possibly have?”

I laugh, and it sounds a little crazy. “It caved in.”

“What ceiling?”

“The ceiling in my apartment.”

There’s a muffled shuffling, like he’s readjusting his phone. “What? Annabel, are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Part of the living room fell in. The living room above us,” I say, twisting the strap of my purse around my hand and letting it go again. “So, I’m a bit late for work, and also I don’t have an apartment. At least there are plenty of prop couches I can crash on, right?”

“Where are you? I’m coming to you right now.”

“Whoa, wait. I’m on the train,” I say, a pleased warmth bubbling in my chest. “I’ll be at the Pearl in fifteen minutes.” I blow a breath out through my lips. “Marilee isn’t going to be happy. I might need to leave early if I’m going to find a place to—”

“You won’t leave early,” Beau says, and his voice is taut with worry. I did not expect this reaction from him. “You’ll have a room at the Pearl. A suite,” he adds. “As long as you need. I’ll meet you there.”

“That’s too much—” I start to say, but the line is already dead.

Beau Bennett, twice the hero. Who knew?