The Summer Children (The Collector #3)(26)

I give her a crooked smile. “I’m doing.”

“Well, that’s something then, isn’t it? And that poor girl?”

“Angry.”

“Good.”

It makes me laugh, and I hug her back, letting go only when Eddison and Sterling get within her hugging range.

Vic’s daughters are all out for the evening, either working or catching up with friends, so there’s only six of us sprawled across the back patio around the grill. Jenny put together what she calls hobo dinners, where you toss a bunch of things onto a square of aluminum foil, crunch it into a pouch, and throw it onto a covered grill or into an oven. She’s got an entire book of handwritten recipes for them, and they are always delicious, provided Vic does his part and gets them off the grill before catastrophe happens.

“Priya sent me a thing today,” Sterling tells me as we watch Marlene and Jenny play tug-of-war with Eddison’s curls. Jenny’s trying to convince him to cut them, or at least get a trim for God’s sake, and Marlene is dramatically proclaiming he’s allowed to do no such thing. Between them, Eddison is blushing and stammering and throwing us increasingly desperate looks for help. We stay a safe distance away with our beers.

“She does that sometimes. What did she send?”

She hands me her phone, which has a link in the message bubble. When I touch it, it takes me to a collection of De-Celebration photosets, where women celebrate a divorce or the end of an engagement with photoshoots of them destroying their wedding dresses in various ways. One woman and her collection of bridesmaids joyously shove their poufy dresses into a woodchipper. Another group is wearing their gowns and playing paintball. One woman, who looks to have torn her dress into strips and tied them together, is climbing down from a hotel window painted BRIDAL SUITE—JUST MARRIED.

“??Qué chingada?!”

“Right? Look at . . . oh, which one was it . . . ah, this one.”

I giggle, staring at the screen and its zombie bride and bridesmaid brigade. “That is definitely a creative use for a nonrefundable dress.”

“She asked if I had any ideas.”

“Do you?”

“Not yet.” She takes a long sip of beer, then raises the bottle to Eddison in a salute when he yields his pride enough to run away from Marlene and Jenny. “But it’s got me thinking.”

God bless Priya.

After an amazing dinner of chicken and zucchini and marinara sauce, and mushrooms for those of us who like them, we talk for a while about the Hanoverian girls, and how strange it will be next year when Janey goes off to college like her sisters. When Marlene starts yawning, we clean up to head out, even though she calls us silly for it.

“You coming home with me?” Eddison asks.

Sterling answers before I can. “No, with me. You can have an estrogen-free evening for once.”

“Y puede que la luna vaya a caer del cielo,” he mutters.

“What was that?”

“Thank you, I appreciate it.”

“Smooth,” I whisper, and elbow him in the side. He rubs at his ribs with a scowl, but doesn’t reply.

I text Holmes so she knows we’re ready to install the cameras Sterling picked up on the way to Vic’s, and by the time we reach the house, a uniformed officer is there to let us past the police tape. He greets us affably and watches us work. The cameras are small, mostly discreet and easy to hide, and Sterling’s worked with them before. Which is good, because when I say we install it, I mean Sterling does, and I hand her things as she asks for them. It only takes her an hour to get them both up and properly networked, the video dumping to both an external hard drive and an online data cache. She’s our tech guru whenever Yvonne is unavailable.

We thank the officer and hit the road to Sterling’s apartment. She lives only a few streets down from Eddison, in a complex owned by the same company and which looks almost identical save for the buildings being pale orange rather than fawn-brown. She sorts through her mail at the box, dumping three-quarters of it straight into the trash can in the corner of the mail room. “Do companies actually bring in enough business from junk mail ads to be worth the money and waste?”

“Probably not, but why should that stop them?”

Her apartment is up on the second floor, and she pauses with her key in the lock. “It might be a little messy right now,” she says apologetically. “I’ve been going through everything to pull donations.”

“Is there a clear path?”

“Yes.”

“Are there bugs?”

“No,” she says more slowly, giving me a sideways stink-eye.

“Is anything growing?”

“No!”

“Then we’re good.”

“You have depressingly low standards,” she sighs, and pushes the door open to flick on the entry light.

I follow her in, closing and locking the door behind me, and get my first-ever look at her place. “Holy fucking God, Eliza.”

Startled, she drops her keys instead of hanging them on the hook she’d been reaching for. “You never call me Eliza.”

“That’s because I’ve never seen this before. I may never be able to call you Sterling again.”

She blushes deeply and retrieves her keys, hanging them neatly on the small claw on the coatrack. “I’m never letting Eddison come here, am I?”