Page 38 of Over Her Dead Body

Owen slides behind the wheel.

I get into the passenger seat and immediately wish I’d just gotten an Uber.

“Vienna was quick,” he says.

“Efficient.”

“You were supposed to be gone four days.”

“I like to exceed expectations.”

“You missed the Bauer viewing.”

“I delegated.”

“You are many things, Emma. A delegator is not one of them.”

He pulls away from the curb before I can think of a lie.

Austin appears around us in airport pieces: concrete, brake lights, rideshare signs, a man in a cowboy hat arguing with a parking machine. It is obscene how normal everything looks. I have been gone less than two days and somehow the city has continued without pausing to acknowledge that my dead husband is alive, good in bed, bad at explanations, and possibly involved in whatever one calls walking out of a building with blood on your shirt and a knife in your waistband.

Probably not networking.

Owen glances over.

I stare out the window.

“Margot said you were unreachable,” he says. “She said you ignored her calls.”

“Margot says a lot of things.”

“She’s worried. She said if I didn’t pick you up, she’d call your mother.”

“That sounds like Margot.”

“She also said not to let you go home alone if you looked haunted.”

I turn. “Do I?”

“No,” he says. Then, because he is Owen, “You look expensive and underfed.”

“Thank God. For a second I was worried grief had ruined my cheekbones.”

His eyes move briefly to my mouth.

Not long enough to call it anything.

Long enough that I notice.

Long enough that I hate myself for noticing.

Owen Mercer and I are not a thing.

There was one elevator in Santa Fe three years ago that might disagree.

Nothing happened.

His hand touched the small of my back when the doors opened. I stepped out. He did not follow.