Page 41 of Over Her Dead Body

Todd: Hello?

Then, beneath it, another message appears.

Unknown Number: Wrong car.

CHAPTER 16

EMMA

Ido not think twice about the text from the unknown number.

Wrong car.

I decide it is spam, a wrong number, someone else’s problem.

That will not be my last mistake.

By nine the following morning, I am at my desk with a coffee, a headache I absolutely earned, and a condition report describing an eighteenth-century silver coffee pot as whimsical.

This is how civilizations fall.

“Whimsical?” I say.

The intern beside my desk goes pale. Her generation has yet to learn that criticism is not death.

“It has unusual feet,” she says.

“So do frogs. We don’t call them whimsical.”

She looks at the report.

I take the pen from her hand and cross out the word.

“Elegant,” I say. “Slightly eccentric if you need to get cute, which you don’t. The handle has been repaired, the hinge is later, and whoever polished it last should be tried in a public square.”

She nods quickly.

“Also,” I say, “never insult silver before ten. It’s been through enough.”

She laughs because she thinks she is supposed to.

Perfect. The day has begun.

The auction house is already moving around me: phones ringing, printers complaining, two men arguing over a crate in the back.

Normal things.

Useful things.

Things that should be enough to keep a person from thinking about Lisbon.

They are not.

My phone lights beside the report.

Todd: Hey.

I look at it for half a second too long.