After an awkward silence, Aimee and I settled on a handshake. Her lower lip quivered. “Will you tell Zach I said goodbye?”
Something inside me broke at the anguish in her voice. Even if Zach was too young to understand or care, I didn’t want to be the one to deliver that message. Delia twisted in her car seat, watching us through the window. I cleared a lump of emotion from my throat. “You said you and Theresa used to tell each other everything. Do you still?”
Aimee frowned. “What do you mean?”
“If you’re willing not to say anything to Theresa—no more video calls, no meetups with her, or trips to her home—then I won’t tell Steven I invited you to visit the kids.”
Aimee’s eyes snapped to mine, clearly wrestling with the wrongness of what I’d just asked of her; it was like asking me to keep a secret from Vero. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I could. But keeping Theresa out of the children’s lives was a point I wasn’t willing to budge on. “I can do that,” she said after a tense pause. “I’m off work this coming Saturday. I could come over then, if it’s okay with you.”
Steven had been firm about spending the weekend with the children. But after what I’d just seen on the forum, I had no intention of letting that happen. Aimee might not be my favorite person, but it was obvious she loved my children. They’d be far safer with her than with Steven.
I opened a new contact and handed her my phone. “Saturday will be fine.”
CHAPTER 11
Never go back to the scene of a crime. It’s simple common sense if you want to get away with murder. Right up there with don’t wrap a corpse in your shower curtain, don’t buy four gallons of bleach and a shovel with your credit card, and don’t keep a chest freezer in your garage. Why Vero had insisted on returning to the mall that afternoon was a mystery, even to me. And yet, that’s exactly where we found ourselves at four o’clock.
We wove between the crowds of shoppers, cutting through the long tail of the line of families waiting to have their pictures taken with Santa. The children’s play area behind Santa’s workshop was packed with frazzled childcare workers and shrieking toddlers. After we checked the kids in, signed the release forms, and left the attendant our phone numbers, Vero dragged me to a distant corner of the mall, where she pulled me into a computer repair shop.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“Just trust me.”
The kid behind the counter couldn’t have been out of high school. He hunched on a stool, his elbow perched beside the register, his head resting in the cradle of his hand and a name badge pinned to the front of his graphic T. He studied his phone through a mop of tangled hair as shrill guitar riffs ripped from a speaker behind him.
Vero knocked on the counter. “Hello?”
The kid looked up, confused, as if he wasn’t sure what day it was or how he’d gotten there. The stool creaked under him as he reached to turn down the volume, exposing a roll of his preternaturally white belly. “Can I help you?”
“We’d like to talk to someone in your Geek Squad…” Vero tipped her head to read his name badge. “Derek.”
He grimaced, turning the stereo back up. “Try down the street at Best Buy.”
“Believe me, I’d love nothing better than to be anywhere else,” Vero said over the music, “but our kids are in the play area and we can’t leave the mall.” His heavy-lidded eyes lifted from his phone, sliding from Vero to me before dropping back to the screen. Vero knocked harder on the counter. “Hello! I said I’m having an issue and I need tech support. Do you have anyone here who knows what they’re doing?”
One eyebrow might have raised a little, as if it couldn’t be bothered to drag itself any higher. “What’s the issue?”
“It’s a security problem.”
He lowered the music with a heavy sigh. “I’ll need to see the device.”
Vero studied him down the length of her nose. “Why?”
“This isn’t a self-help line, lady. You want me to fix your shit, you give me the device and pay by the hour.” He held out a hand. There was a smear of chocolate on his thumb. I cringed as I drew my brand-new laptop from my bag and handed it over to him.
“You said it’s a security problem?” he asked, opening my screen.
“More like a question,” I began cautiously. “I was wondering … how secure is my laptop if I’m on an open Wi-Fi, like the one in the food court?”