Page 28 of The Next Lie

The door opens behind me. I don’t bother turning. Only one person in this building would enter this room without knocking while Nash is gone and expect to remain alive.

“You fucking…liar,” Delia says.

Her voice is steady. Her breathing is not.

I turn then.

She stands inside the doorway with one hand still on the knob, her face pale beneath the club makeup, tear tracks cutting through the powder on her cheeks. She has fixed the rest of herself. Hair smooth. Dress straight. Mouth composed.

The eyes ruin it. They are too much like Reva’s tonight. That is cruel of God, if he is still taking credit for anything.

“Nash told me you were here,” she says.

“Did he?”

Her mouth tightens. “He told me to stay away.”

“Yet here you are.”

“Apparently I learned from the best.”

The words cut, though not as clean as she wants them to.

There was a time Delia used to look at me like I had answers. Like I had dragged her out of hell instead of just delivering her to a different room inside it. That time did not last long. She grew up. Smart girls do.

“What do you need?” I ask.

Her chin lifts. “Why is Reva here?”

“I don’t know every step that brought her to New Orleans.”

“Don’t do that.”

The echo of Reva almost makes me smile.

Almost.

Delia sees it and goes colder. “Why now?”

“She came looking for me.”

Her face flinches before she can stop it.

“Why?”

“I think because she remembered my name.”

Delia turns away, one hand going to her mouth. She does not cry. She has already cried somewhere else and punished herself for it. Now she presses her knuckles to her lips and drags in one careful breath through her nose.

“She was dead,” she says. The words come out flat.

“No.”

“She was dead as far as I knew.”

That is different and also true.

I say nothing.