The Perfect Stranger (Social Media #2)(27)

Dad adjourned to the den around the same time, presumably planning to spend the night in his recliner once again. Beck had offered him her room, pointing out that she can sleep in the other bunk in the boys’ room where Keith is, but Dad turned her down.

That was fine with her—and not just because she understood how hard it would be for her father to climb the stairs to go to bed, no matter which bedroom he was sleeping in.

She’s just not eager to share space with Keith right now, and she’s pretty sure he feels the same way.

“What did you tell them?” she asked him after he spoke to the detectives this afternoon.

“What do you think I told them?”

“I have no idea. Why do you think I’m asking?” she said aloud.

To herself, she thought, Jackass.

Thank God she never confided in him about her father—about what she saw, that one time.

The incident did nag at her for a few weeks after it happened, and at the time she considered telling Keith about it, but she kept it to herself in the end.

Thank God. Thank God.

The floorboard creaks again.

“Hello?” she calls.

As much as she hopes her father is finally getting some sleep, she’d prefer to see him pop up in the kitchen doorway right now, rather than her husband.

“Dad? Keith?”

No reply. She’s just starting to think she imagined the creaking when a shadow falls across the floor.

Keith.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Why are you still up?” he asks, simultaneously.

He’s still dressed—or perhaps dressed again—in jeans and a T-shirt. And he’s wearing shoes, she notices.

“I’m hungry,” he says with a shrug. “Is there any more of that chicken casserole from dinner?”

She looks from his face to the phone in his hand to the fridge.

“Help yourself.”

He crosses over to the refrigerator and opens the door. “So what are you doing up, Rebecca?”

He always calls her by her full name, unlike her family and friends. That never really bothered her until now. In fact, when she first met him she thought it was sweet and refreshing.

But lately—especially here in her childhood home, where she’s been referred to as Beck all her life—her given name, particularly on her husband’s lips, seems stiff and formal.

“I was just rereading my mother’s blog,” she tells him.

And trying to hack into her e-mail account . . .

But Keith doesn’t need to know that. For some reason, she feels like he might not approve.

“Why?” he asks.

“Why, what?”

“Why are you reading her blog?”

“I was just looking for . . .” She trails off, watching him lift a corner of foil off the casserole dish in the fridge, peer inside, and fold it back down.

“What were you looking for?” he asks.

“I was just looking to see what she’d written lately. That’s all. It makes me feel close to her.”

“Oh.” He opens the crisper drawer, takes out an apple, closes the fridge.

“I thought you were hungry.”

“I am. I’m having an apple.”

“I thought you wanted that chicken casserole.”

“So did I, but . . . it’s congealed.”

“You can heat it in the microwave.”

“No, thanks. This is fine.”

You weren’t hungry at all, she thinks, watching him wash the apple at the sink.

In all the years they’ve been married, he’s never been a midnight snacker. If anything, she’s the one who gets up and roots around the fridge in the wee hours.

Besides, when she served the chicken casserole the neighbor dropped off for their dinner, he picked at it. The recipe was probably straight off the label of a can of cream soup, and Keith—who works for the department of animal and food sciences at the university—isn’t big on packaged foods as ingredients for anything.

She’d bet anything that he has his car keys in his pocket. He was probably going to sneak out of the house like a wayward teenager, probably thinking he could rendezvous with . . . whoever . . . and be back at dawn.

Sorry, pal, she thinks, watching him crunch into the apple. Guess I foiled your plan.

At last Landry hears the garage door going up.

Rob is home, thank goodness. He might not understand about Meredith, but he’ll listen patiently, and he’ll care. Or at least pretend to.

“Which one is she?” he’ll ask, never able to tell her online friends apart when she talks about them.

If Landry explains, “She’s the older woman who lives in Ohio,” or “She’s the one who writes the Pink Stinks blog,” he’ll murmur as if he knows who she means, but he won’t. He’ll be sympathetic, though he won’t understand how the loss of a woman she’s never met can hit so hard.

That’s how he reacted in January, when Nell died.

She, too, was a blogger. She lived in England.

“Whoa Nellie died today,” Landry told Rob when he walked in the door that night.

Concern immediately etched his face. “Who?”

“My friend Nell. Whoa Nellie. That’s the name of her blog.”