At the bottom, I take a few more deep breaths before heading into the kitchen. Boone is at the stove, making pancakes and looking like a sexy celebrity chef in tight jeans, a tighter T-shirt, and an apron that literally says Kiss the Cook. I catch him in the middle of flipping a pancake. With a flick of his wrist, it leaps from the pan like a gymnast before somersaulting back into place.
“Take a seat,” he says. “Breakfast is almost ready.”
He turns away from the stove long enough to hand me a steaming mug of coffee. I take a grateful sip and sit at the kitchen counter. Despite my clanging headache and not knowing any details about the previous night, there’s a coziness to the situation that prompts both comfort and no small amount of guilt. This is exactly how Len and I spent our weekend mornings here, with me savoring coffee while he made breakfast in the same apron Boone now wears. Doing it with someone else feels like cheating, which surprises me. I felt no such guilt when having sex with a stagehand from Shred of Doubt. I guess because, in that instance, I knew the score. What this is, I have no idea.
Boone slides a plate piled with pancakes and bacon on the side, and my stomach gives off a painful twinge.
“Truth be told, I’m not very hungry,” I say.
Boone joins me with his own plate heaped with food. “Eating will do you some good. Feed a hangover, starve a fever. Isn’t that how the saying goes?”
“No.”
“Close enough,” he says as he tops his pancakes with two pats of butter. “Now eat.”
I nibble a piece of bacon, nervous it might send me running to the bathroom with nausea. To my surprise, it makes me feel better. As does a bite of pancake. Soon I’m shoveling the food into my mouth, washing it down with more coffee.
“We should have picked up some maple syrup at the store yesterday,” Boone says casually, as if we have breakfast together all the time.
I lower my fork. “Can we talk about last night?”
“Sure. If you can remember it.”
Boone immediately takes a sip of coffee, as if that will somehow soften the judgment in his voice. I pretend to ignore it.
“I was hoping you could fill in the blanks a bit.”
“I was just about to go up to bed when I saw Tom’s Bentley drive by the house,” Boone says. “Since there’s no reason for him to be driving on this side of the lake, I assumed he was coming to see one of us. And since he didn’t stop at my place, I figured he had to be going to see you. And I didn’t think that was a good thing.”
“He caught me watching the house,” I say. “Apparently he picked up his own pair of binoculars while at the hardware store.”
“Was he mad?”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“What happened while he was here?”
I eat two more bites of pancake, take a long sip of coffee, and try to bring my blurry memories of Tom’s visit into focus. A few do, snapping into clarity right when I need them to.
“I turned off all the lights and hid by the door,” I say, remembering the feel of the door against my back as it rattled under Tom’s knocking. “But he knew I was here, so he yelled some stuff.”
Boone looks up from his plate. “What kind of stuff?”
“This is where it starts to get foggy. I think I remember the gist of what he said, but not his exact words.”
“Then paraphrase.”
“He said he knew that I’ve been spying on him and that it was me who told Wilma about Katherine. Oh, and that he knew I’d broken into his house.”
“Did he threaten you?” Boone says.
“Not exactly. I mean, it was scary. But no, there were no threats. He just told me to leave him alone and left. Then you came to the door.”
I pause, signaling that I can’t remember anything else and that I’m hoping Boone can tell me the rest. He does, although he looks slightly annoyed at having to remind me of something I should have been sober enough to recall on my own.
“I heard you inside after I knocked,” he says. “You were mumbling and sounded dazed. I thought you were hurt and not—”
Boone stops talking, as if the word drunk is contagious and he’ll become one again if he dares to utter it.
“You came inside to check on me,” I say, hit with the image of him looming over me, swathed in shadow.
“I did.”
“How?”
“The ground floor.”
Boone’s referring to the door to the basement. The one with faded blue paint and a persistent squeak that leads directly to the backyard beneath the porch. I didn’t know it was unlocked because I haven’t been down there since the morning I woke up and Len was gone.