The first detective she called asked her to say her name again after she introduced herself and then to spell it. After a bit of typing, he told her he didn’t have any availability until September.
“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said. “Could you refer me to another P.I. Someone who might be available?”
“I don’t think you’re going to find anybody,” he said. “Summer’s awful busy.”
And he’d been right. Every single P.I. she’d called informed her that he or she didn’t have any availability until September, even the ones who worked for agencies told her no one was available until September.
But by the sixth no, she became suspicious. She asked her co-worker Carol to call the first P.I. pretending to be a suspicious wife, and he told Carol for a small retainer, he could start working on the case as early as the following week.
“Why you snake in the grass!” Carol put him on speaker phone, and held up her cell so they could both hear. “You just told my friend you didn’t have any availability until September.”
“Whose your friend?” the detective asked.
“Layla Matthews,” Layla said, leaning in to talk into Carol’s phone. “Hi, I’m right here with Carol and wondering why you lied to me.”
The detective cleared his throat. “I didn’t lie to you. I don’t have any availability for you, but anybody else, I’m willing to take the case.”
“What?” Carol looked like she was gearing up to cuss the unseen detective out.
But Layla just rubbed her temple. “Nathan got to you, didn’t he?”
“I can’t say either way. But somebody with a lot of money let it be known he or she is willing to pay any detective in Pittsburgh you call a substantial fee to turn down your case, no questions asked.”
“What?!” Carol nearly screeched.
“Wow,” Layla said. “Well, thank you anyway. I’m sure you would have been very helpful if Nathan hadn’t got to you first.”
“Sorry, kid.” The detective sounded sincere. “It’s hard to turn down easy money when you live case-to-case.”
“You’re a slime ball,” Carol informed him, pointing at the cell phone.
“I totally understand,” Layla said. “And I hope you get plenty of cases to tide you over this summer.”
“So why exactly are you dating this guy again?” Carol asked after she hung up.
“We’re not dating,” Layla answered.
“What then, you’re just living together, and spending every hour you’re not here with him?”
“Yeah, it’s complicated,” Layla said. “Do you have any aspirin?”
She ended up taking the two Aleeve before getting on the bus to Nathan’s place. Just that morning, she had thought of swinging by his job instead of heading straight to his apartment, thinking maybe they could grab some dinner. But now that idea was off the table, because she already knew the only thing they’d be doing that night was fighting. This wouldn’t have been so bad, but two weeks into whatever their relationship was, Layla had surprisingly already grown out of the habit of constantly arguing with him.
To her surprise, after she’d agreed to leave Pittsburgh, they’d started getting along outside of bed, too. Growing up as she did, with a father who used sweet talk and manipulation to take advantage of people, she’d found herself oddly attracted to Nathan’s straight-forwardness. With other people she was constantly on guard, to make sure she didn’t say anything that would hurt their feelings or make them feel bad in any way. But with Nathan, she could say anything she darn well pleased, because he had no trouble doing the same. This made him shockingly easy to talk to.
They’d discussed their childhoods, their adult lives, their hopes and dreams. She’d confessed to him about how lonely it had been growing up without a mother or any siblings. And late one night, he’d told her about the “three year rebellion,” which was what he called the gap years between graduating from his elite private school and his matriculation into Yale.
“At first it was about making my parents see that they couldn’t control me past my eighteenth birthday, then I got bored, but I was too stubborn to admit it. I had them worried there for a while. I think they were afraid they’d raised a deadbeat. Sometimes I wonder if my father named me CEO in his will as a thank you for finally meeting their expectations.”
“What made you stop being stubborn and agree to go to college?” she’d asked.
Nathan’s answer to that had been to turn away from her in bed and reach over to his bedside clock. “I’m setting the alarm for an hour earlier. I have a conference meeting with Matsuda, and I want to go over a few details with the translator before we get on the line.”
That’s how Layla knew that she must have somehow figured into his decision to give in to his parents and go to college. The only thing they didn’t talk about was the short time that their lives had intersected. Whenever she tried to bring it up, even accidentally, Nathan either changed the subject or made it clear it was off-limits.
Still, everything else was on the table for discussion, and when you stripped away the class and professional differences, she and Nathan had a lot in common. Disappointing fathers: his had given his life to Sinclair Industries, literally—he’d had a heart attack in his office before ever really getting to know his son as an adult. They both had delayed college experiences – Nathan’s due to the three-year rebellion, hers due to the fall. They also both had a fair amount of ambition.
Sinclair Industries wasn’t publicly traded and had only netted domestic contracts for almost one-hundred years, but Nathan really believed he could make the company a worldwide name, especially if they landed the Japanese deal. Listening to him talk about it, Layla believed he could transform his company, too.
The night before finding out that he’d detective-blocked her, she’d told him about her secret dream of eventually starting a physical therapy center of her own while they ate dinner. “Our patients are often so traumatized when they come to us. I wish I could make it easier for them. I read about these spas in Beverly Hills that cater to people recovering from plastic surgery, and I wondered why we don’t have anything like that for physical therapy. People could come in and get their PT, but it would be in a relaxing environment. If they wanted they could get a manicure/pedicure after their session, and maybe we’d even have a hair salon. It’s hard to keep up with your beauty stuff when you’re in recovery, but people really do feel so much better when they look good.”