Page 74 of The Next Lie

The more accurate version is that I have been waiting for fifteen years, and I am finished with it.

I have let Nash stand between us. I have let Ever watch me like he is deciding where to put the knife. I have let Shiloh smile with his pretty mouth while measuring how far he would get before I broke his jaw.

I have let Reva look at me like I am a loaded gun left on the table.

Enough.

She came to New Orleans. She walked into Noir. She said my name like a sentence she had been carrying since childhood. She saw Delia. She went back to the Hart house. She remembered enough to make this dangerous and not enough to make it useful.

She is done orbiting the truth.

So am I.

The kitchen light is on.

Not the overhead. A smaller light under the cabinets throws a warm strip across the counters and leaves the rest of the room in shadow. I stop in the doorway before I step fully inside.

Reva sits at the island with a banana in one hand and a small dish of thumbtacks in the other.

I have seen strange things at three in the morning.

This is new.

She is wearing leggings and an oversized hoodie that is not hers. Shiloh’s, judging by the way it hangs off her shoulders and the unfortunate amount of satisfaction the bastard probably takes in that. Her hair is twisted into a loose knot that has surrendered in several places. Her face is bare. Tired. Too pale in the soft kitchen light.

Her hands are steady.

That worries me more than shaking would.

She presses one thumbtack into the peeled banana. Then another. And another.

A careful line down the length of it, each tack placed with slow, deliberate precision. At the top, she adds two more, side by side.

I tilt my head. No one has ever accused me of being stupid. Reva Leigh Hart may be the first woman alive who can make me wonder whether I’m a little thick sometimes, though.

She studies her work.

A peeled banana covered in a single measured row of thumbtacks. With two at the top.

Christ.

I understand what I am looking at one second before she lifts the thing toward her mouth.

“Reva.”

She looks up. There is a moment—small, sharp, bright—where she realizes I am in the doorway.

Then she does it anyway.

She slides the banana into her mouth with such solemn, fuck-you intent that my entire body forgets how to function.

I choke on my own spit.

Reva’s eyes widen around the banana. Then she chokes too.

The fruit slips too far back, her body jerks, and the dish of thumbtacks clatters against the counter and to the floor as her hand flies to her throat.

Every ounce of amusement leaves me. I am across the kitchen before the dish stops spinning.