All the Lies We Tell (Quarry Road #1)(40)

“Okay,” she repeated with as little inflection as possible, giving him nothing.

Nothing.

Nikolai’s eyes narrowed. “Thought you might like to know that I’m not heading out for a while, either. The house needs a lot of work, and my mother is asking me to do it.”

“And you’re the one who fixes things. Right?” she said in the same flat tone.

“Doesn’t someone have to?”

“Don’t look at me because things fell apart,” Alicia said coolly, deliberately ignoring the double meaning of his comment.

“Hey, you. Fancy meeting you here.” The feminine voice from behind him made Nikolai turn, revealing Theresa standing in the doorway. “Hey, Allie.”

“She likes to be called Alicia,” he said.

Alicia kept her mouth in a thin line, refusing to smile or rise to his taunt. “Hey, Theresa. What’s up?”

“Everything okay at home?” Nikolai asked his former stepsister.

Theresa gave him a small smile and a shrug. “Your brother was still sleeping when I left, and Galina was on the computer looking up laminate flooring.”

Nikolai sighed. “Great.”

“I came to see if you wanted to grab some lunch, Alicia.” Theresa hitched her shoulder bag a little higher and waited until he’d moved out of the way so she could come into Alicia’s office. She glanced at Nikolai.

“Sure,” Alicia said. “I have nothing better going on.”

Nikolai made a noise low in his throat, not quite a word, and said aloud, “I’m out of here. Theresa, are you coming back to the house later?”

“I wasn’t going to,” she said with a shake of her head and a wry grin. “But your mother insisted. She said as long as I had business in town, I should stay at the house. Of course, she also made a big point of telling me that she plans to turn the room I’m using into a library, something about custom-made shelves. So I’m not sure she really wants to me to hang around.”

Nikolai groaned and rubbed at his eyes. “Great, custom shelves. Guess who gets to build those. I’m pretty sure fixing that shower is the first priority, though. Well, I guess I’d better call and find out what else she needs me to pick up from the hardware store. All . . . icia, can I bring you back anything? New hammer? Some nails? Doggy door?”

“I don’t have a dog.”

Nikolai snapped his fingers. “Right. Want me to grab you one while I’m out? How about a nice little shitzapoo, or something like that? A poodoodle? A cockashitz!”

“Get out of here,” she said, breaking, wishing she could maintain her anger with him the way she wanted to, but helpless not to laugh. She stifled it behind her hand, but the flash of Nikolai’s grin and a totally cocky wink told her he’d heard the giggle in her voice.

He saluted them both. “Good day, ladies.”

He added an ominous emphasis to the word, and with a flourish, exited the room. Theresa watched him go, then threw Alicia a curious look. She pretended not to notice.

“I have to finish up a couple things, and then we can go.” Alicia said with a wave toward the chair across from her desk. She waited for the sound of the bell at the front door to jingle, announcing Nikolai’s exit. “What a crazy couple of weeks.”

Theresa took a seat, her bag on her lap. “Yeah. Totally.”

“Nikolai said his mother isn’t going back to South Carolina.” Alicia closed out of the multiple browser tabs she’d had open. Travel blogs, mostly. Just because she’d never gone anywhere exotic didn’t mean she didn’t like to read about the trips other people took.

“She mentioned that to me, too,” Theresa answered. “I guess I hadn’t realized that she’d been down there so long.”

“Since before Ilya and I got married.” Alicia talked to her parents weekly, sometimes on the phone or via video chat, and while they never came back to Pennsylvania, she visited them several times a year. Galina had often contacted Ilya over the phone or e-mail, but had also gone long stretches of time without a word. Alicia hadn’t thought it was right to have such sporadic contact, but Galina wasn’t her mother, and therefore it hadn’t been up to her.

“Why do you think she’s staying up here this time?”

Alicia thought about it for a second. “Is it wrong of me to feel suspicious? Like she has an ulterior motive?”

“No,” Theresa laughed. “When someone behaves the same way for as long as you’ve known them, it’s natural to expect they’ll keep behaving the same way. It has that feeling about it, doesn’t it? Like an accident waiting to happen.”

“That’s a good way to describe it.” It wasn’t Galina who made her feel that way, it was Nikolai, but she wasn’t going to let herself think about him anymore. Alicia stood. “Ready for lunch? Where do you want to go?”

“You pick. Do you mind driving separately? I have some appointments on the other side of town this afternoon.”

They agreed to meet at a local pizza shop, not yet crowded since it wasn’t quite lunchtime. They ordered slices and drinks and took them to a back booth. Alicia looked up at the sound of a cough to see a woman who looked semifamiliar, but whose face she couldn’t place.

“I’m Mimi Zook,” the older woman said. “I work at the home where your grandmother lived. I’m sorry to hear of her passing. She was one of the loveliest residents.”