“About time,” she says, walking past him to go inside.
Wes follows her into the living room. She stands in the middle of the room, showing no signs of relaxing or sitting down. Wes plops down on the couch and rubs his eyes. “Why are you here?” he says.
“Didn’t Karen call you?”
“Today?”
“Yes. Well, technically it was yesterday,” she says. “Since it’s already tomorrow.”
“No. I haven’t heard from her recently.”
Ivy sits down, though not on the couch. She picks the chair across from him and leans forward, elbows on her knees. “Then I’m doing you a favor,” she says. “Which is pretty nice of me, considering you just vanished.”
Wes almost takes the bait. He wants to, since this fight has been coming for a while, but the call from Karen is more important. “What did she say?” he asks.
“Karen is on the Joey Fisher case. They’re ‘reactivating the investigation.’？” She uses air quotes for those last words.
“Are you joking?”
“At one in the morning? No, Wes. I’m not joking.”
If he wasn’t fully awake, he is now. “Well, damn.”
“Eloquent.”
“They have new evidence,” he says. “They must.”
“Obviously. She has no reason to tell me about Joey unless she’s found a connection.”
Wes feels the anger start to expand inside him, growing like a tumor. Again. Ivy could’ve done a lot of things to get his attention other than call the police. Showing up at his place in the middle of the night works pretty well.
But that would’ve been too boring for Ivy. For him, too, if he’s being honest. He would’ve been disappointed at her lack of creativity. Although being bored and disappointed sounds pretty good right now.
“At some point,” Ivy says, “we’ll need to address the fact that you’re dating someone new. But for now, let’s make sure we’re still telling the same story.”
Again, Wes almost takes the bait and says something about Milo, but he holds off. “You start,” he says.
“It was a Thursday night. My shift at the Fine Line started at nine o’clock. I took a taxi to the club and arrived around eight thirty to get ready. I was in training, so I followed another girl around for a couple hours to learn how to log drinks into the computer and print out the checks. The club wasn’t too crowded at that point—it was the lull between happy hour and the after-dinner crowd. Started to pick up about ten o’clock. After that, I was busy all night.”
“I showed up at the club around midnight,” Wes says. “I had gone out with some friends and stopped by to say hello and have a drink.”
“I saw you but didn’t want to get in trouble on my first night, so we didn’t really talk.”
“Right,” Wes says. “I hung around and had a drink, and then your shift ended. You decided to come home with me instead of calling another cab.”
Ivy nods. “The next morning, when I woke up, you had already left for work and the car was gone. I assumed you had taken it.”
“But I got a ride with a coworker who picked me up, because I thought you needed the car that day.”
“Except I didn’t know that until you came home from work without the car.”
“Which is when we both realized it had been stolen,” Wes says.
“So I called the police.”
“Eventually, they showed up to make a report,” Wes says. “Took them about two hours to get—”
“Two and a half hours,” she says.
“Two and half hours to get to the apartment. We gave them the description, showed them where it had been parked, and that was it.”
“I gave a copy of the report to the insurance company,” Ivy says. “And eventually, we bought another car.”
Wes rolls his eyes. A Saab. He hated that car, but it was what Ivy had wanted.
She does not acknowledge his disdain. “We never heard anything from the police about the 4Runner. Not until two years later, when it was pulled out of the lake.”
“Damaged. The car had been damaged, and it wasn’t like that when it was stolen.”
“Right,” she says. “What kind of questions do you think they’ll ask?”
“Probably about that night, when we left the club. They’ll ask who was driving, which route we took, the streets we used.” He rattles off the directions he memorized, which isn’t exactly the way they went.
“What about the club?” Ivy says. “What if Karen knows what happened there?”
“How? You barely worked there. No one is going to remember us seven years later.”
Ivy gives him a look.
“Okay, some people might remember what happened at the club,” he says. “But there’s no way to prove it was us. Even if the club had cameras all over the parking lot, no one will have the footage. The Fine Line doesn’t even exist anymore.”
Ivy nods, conceding his point.
“I don’t know if it’ll get this far, but if they want to bring me in for questioning at the police station,” Wes says, “I’m getting a lawyer.”
“You don’t think that’ll make you look guilty?”
“It’ll make me look like I have a brain,” he says. “And you need to get a lawyer, too.”
She looks down, playing with the strap of her bag. “I thought we were in this together.”
“Ivy, we can’t have the same lawyer. That’s not how it works.”
She stands up, knocking a pillow off the chair. “I guess that’s it, then. Nothing more to talk about.”
“Don’t be like that,” Wes says, getting up off the couch. “Don’t be mad. This is what we have to do.”
“You’re the one who’s mad. You’re so . . .” Ivy waves her arms around, gesturing to nothing and everything. “You’re so angry with me.”
He is, because of that call she made to the police. She must know that, though he’s not going to be the one to say it. Turns out, he doesn’t have to.
“How was I supposed to know?” she says. “We have no connection to Joey . . . None. At all. And it’s been seven years. Why would I think anyone would dig it up now?”
Wes actually feels a little bad for her. No way she wanted to start all of this.
“Hey.” He walks over to her and puts his hands on her shoulders. “We’re going to be fine. Just stick to the story, and this will all blow over.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Okay,” she says. A smile. A small one, but it’s enough.
“Stay here tonight,” he says.
“You’re dating that girl.”
“I haven’t seen her since the night at Liver,” he says. “And you’re dating that guy on your Insta.”
“I am not.”
“You posted his picture.”
“You ghosted me.”
“You ignored me.”
They stare at each other, neither one backing down. Like kids in a blinking contest.
Ivy never breaks first. She looks at him, jaw tilted up, hands on hips. Seriously, why is she so hot when she’s angry? It’s so annoying. So distracting.