Chapter 14: Ask Properly

Ellery's POV

"I'm not his mistress," I said. "I'm the woman he didn't pay for."

Margot Hunsicker looked at me for a long moment.

Then she turned the ring on her finger and nodded once.

"Good," she said. "I'm in the market for a witness."

"Margot," Hugh said. "We should go upstairs."

"We should go to the Hunsickers' hotel. Daddy lands at four."

She did not look at him when she said it.

"Tristan has booked a table for tomorrow night. All of us."

"He told me to bring anyone who wanted to hear it."

"He told you that?"

"He rang me at three in the morning, Hugh. He sounded like a person."

Hugh's smile did not move, but his hand found his cufflink.

Margot wheeled her case to the door and stopped.

"Wear something you can sit in," she said to me. "It'll be long."

They went out into the traffic, and the glass door swung shut behind them.

The lobby was quiet.

Piers was holding the green pen's cap between two fingers.

"Is she an ally?" I said.

"I've no idea," he said. "She has excellent posture, which suggests either."

I laughed so suddenly that my side pulled.

He took half a step toward me and stopped.

"The clinic," he said. "Two o'clock. They said the stitches come out today."

"You remember my appointments?"

"It's in your file."

"You keep saying that."

"I keep being right."

The clinic took the stitches out in four minutes. It stung, and then it did not.

When I walked out into the corridor, Piers was sitting on a plastic chair.

His glasses were pushed up, and a paper cup of tea stood beside him.

He had been there the whole time.

Nobody had waited for me outside a hospital door before.

I stood there with my hand pressed to the new gauze and I made a decision.

That evening I left my door unlocked.

He knocked anyway, at seven, with a bag from the Indian place at the corner.

"I brought too much," he said.

"Put it down."

"Ellery, it will..."

"Put it down," I said. "Please. I'm asking."

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