Her usually pristine pants and shirt were wrinkled. Her hair had slipped out of its bun to hang in a loose ponytail, a few strands completely free to dance around her face. There were purple smudges under her eyes, and the whites were red.
“Oh, hey,” she said, stepping out, rolling a suitcase behind her. “I was going to… freshen up before I told you I was home,” she admitted, moving to stick her key in the lock.
I couldn’t help but wonder if she wanted to clean up just because she wore her perfect demeanor like a shield… or if she wanted to look nice for me.
The latter was so steeped in wishful thinking that I immediately brushed it aside.
Before I could say anything, Blair pushed the door open and took half a step inside.
“What the hell?”
I wasn’t sure what the best way to ease her into this was, so I just jumped in.
“I was in bed when I heard a crash up here,” I told her. “So I decided to come and check to make sure you were okay.”
“Did you break in?” she asked, whipping around, her eyes a mix of shock and hurt.
“No. No, I wouldn’t do that. Unless I heard you screaming or something. No, that’s the thing. When I got here, the door was wide open.”
“What?”
“Yeah. I went in because, well…”
“Was someone in here?” she asked, stiffening more with each breath she took.
“I didn’t think so at first. I ran into your bedroom. But as I was checking your closet for fallen furniture or something, I heard someone. When I rushed out, he was running out of your spare room. I chased him down the steps, but lost him on the street.”
“Did he take anything?”
“Not that I could see. But you’re going to want to check. I think the crash I heard, though, was the safe in the closet.”
“Oh,” she said, her brows pinching. “That.”
“He didn’t seem to get it open.”
“Almost wish he did. I don’t have a key. It was Matt’s,” she admitted. “I had no idea it existed. He had it really well hidden.”
“In your old apartment?” It seemed unlikely that Matt’s family, with their thorough inspection, would have missed a safe.
“No, in the storage cage in the basement,” she told me, going over to the kitchen to make coffee. “I forgot it was even there. I never kept anything in it. But when I told the property manager I was moving, she reminded me to clean out the cage.”
“Matt kept shit in it?”
“It was so crammed in there that it caused a mini avalanche just to open the door.”
“What was it all?”
To that, she huffed out a breath as she grabbed a second cup of coffee, passing the finished first one to me.
“You know Matthew. Just… junk. Boxes of random electronics. I honestly didn’t even go through it all. I just called someone to load it all up and take it to the storage unit I was already paying for for Matthew’s junk. I figured I could give Ronny the key and let her deal with it all. But it felt wrong toput the safe in there. So I had that brought here with everything else.”
“What kind of electronics?” I asked, feeling a weird tingle move up my spine.
“What? Oh, um, phones mostly. He probably found a box that ‘fell off the back of a truck’ or something and thought he could resell them.”
She paused to take a long sniff of her coffee before taking a careful sip. She stared down at her mug for a second. “I had the worst, most turbulent flight, and now this.”
She sounded as exhausted as she looked.
