Page 77 of Over Her Dead Body

The champagne was terrible. We finished it anyway.

“What comes after junior specialist?” Reid asked.

“Specialist.”

“And after that?”

“Senior specialist.”

He waited.

“Partner,” I said. “Eventually.”

“How eventually?”

“A decade, if I’m very good and no one develops a personal objection to me.”

“So longer than a decade.”

I kicked his ankle.

Reid caught my foot and pulled it into his lap. “Ten years?”

“If I’m lucky.”

I pulled my foot free. “Don’t worry. No one makes it ten years in that house.”

Reid lifted his glass. “You will.”

I touched my glass to his again.

“To ten years,” he said.

Later, I read sections of the employee handbook aloud while he brushed his teeth. He objected to the restrictions on client gifts and approved of the international travel policy. By the time he came to bed, I had planned the next decade of our lives.

Reid listened as though he expected to be there for all of it.

I expected that too.

He wasn’t.

I have spent every year since trying to prove he was right about me.

Now I am back at my desk, where the Lisbon inquiry is still open on my screen and Celeste’s deadline is approaching.

My phone vibrates.

An unknown number.

One more spam text and I am changing mine.

Wrong glass.

I read it twice, then tap Delete and Report Junk.

Funny. What they should have written was wrong girl.

The girl whose job I took lost it for repeating something private about a client within earshot of the wrong person.