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“What do you think?” Chris asked. “Isn’t it a good picture?”
“It’s a great picture,” Laura said. She met his eyes and had to look away again, but that only brought her eyes in line with the picture once more, and she turned and rushed to the fridge so that she could hang it up with magnets as an excuse to not have to look.
“Can I go play?” Amy asked.
“You want to play with Lacey’s toys?” Laura asked, turning, and giving her a raised eyebrow – but a playful one.
Amy nodded sagely. “She wouldn’t mind.”
Laura bit her lip to hold back a smile this time. The thing was, Amy was right. Lacey loved Amy like a sister. They played together and shared toys every weekend. And even with kids she didn’t love, Lacey had been raised to share. That was one of the good things Laura could say about her ex-husband’s parenting.
“Okay,” Laura said. “Go on into her bedroom and choose something to play with, then. But you’ve got to take good care of it so Lacey doesn’t get upset.”
“I will!” Amy declared, quickly disappearing now that she had secured permission.
“Well, I’m glad she’s happy,” Laura half-laughed. She turned to Chris, feeling strangely awkward for a moment. “Um. Coffee?”
“Very much so,” Chris grinned, sitting down on her sofa. “I had a fully-booked morning, so when I got out to pick up Amy from kindergarten, you were the first person I thought of.”
“Really?” Laura asked, grabbing two mugs from the cupboard. Her coffee machine was nowhere near as fancy as Chris’s, but it would have to do. “Why’s that?”
“Because when I’m tired and need someone to help me relax from all the stress, I know I can rely on you to do that,” Chris said. When Laura looked back at him, his handsome face was relaxed into a smile that wrinkled the corners of his eyes. Was he trying to kill her today with a heart attack, or what? Because she felt like that particular organ had stopped, swelled, and almost burst at least five times since he came in.
“We had a morning of it, too,” she said, trying to smoothly carry on instead of falling into a puddle of goo in front of him. “We went into Maryland and back, chasing a lead that turned out to be nothing.”
“A lead?” Chris asked. “I thought you were between cases right now – isn’t that why you’re home?”
“Yeah.” Laura filled his cup and then her own, and walked them the short distance between the kitchen and the sofa. “It wasn’t a case so much as a vision.”
“Oh,” Chris said, nodding. He still wasn’t quite used to the fact that she had psychic visions. He accepted it, but he was still processing and understanding it. He was clearly trying to act normal in response to her news, but he was overdoing it, his head moving up and down far too vehemently.
Laura curled up next to him on the sofa with her cup, thinking that the best way to get him through this awkwardness was just to keep going until he was acclimatized. “I saw a woman being – you know, m-worded.”
“M-word…?” Chris followed her glance towards the open door which served as Lacey’s room, and his eyebrows lifted in understanding. While there was a risk that Amy could overhear, Laura didn’t want to say the gory details outright. “Ah. Go on.”
“Well, there’s not much more to the story,” Laura said, taking a sip. “We get there, and it turns out I was actually seeing something that happened four years ago. So, we were too late to save anyone, and I didn’t get any information in the vision that would help close the case, so I guess I wasted our time.”
“You saw the past?” Chris frowned. “Aren’t you supposed to see the future?”
Laura shrugged her shoulders. “Don’t ask me. I barely understand how this thing works, you know.”
“You’ve had thirty…” Chris left the end of the number dangling, but instead of filling it in, he caught Laura’s severe look and cleared his throat. “Thirty years to get used to this thing. And you still don’t get it fully. How long is it going to take me to get used to it?”
“You’ll get there,” Laura said. “Nate did. I called him at three in the morning to investigate a case I saw in a dream and he didn’t even bat an eyelid.”
“Hm,” Chris hummed.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing.”
Laura looked at him. “You’re jealous.”
“No,” Chris said, taking a sip of his coffee.
“You are!” Laura chuckled. “Oh, my God. You’re jealous of Nate.”
“Well!” Chris said, exasperated. “He gets to spend a lot more time with you than I do.”
