It was a good thing that PJ and I decided to forgo the alcohol last night, because the next day at work wasn’t anything I could have faced with a hangover. As it was, everything had a vaguely unfocused quality, as if my mental eyes needed glasses. I’d experienced that before, so I knew exactly what the cause was.

I’d lost a friend.

While I might get involved in answering emails or polishing my product launch presentation, momentarily forgetting what had happened, I’d suddenly flash on Ava lying facedown in her closet and things would go blurry again. Then I’d feel guilty for not feeling worse. Yes, Ava’s death was a shock and a sorrow, but it didn’t completely debilitate me. She hadn’t been family or even a particularly close friend. If, heaven forbid, something had happened to PJ, I wouldn’t be able to function with even a hint of normalcy. As it was, Neal didn’t notice anything at all when he popped into my office just as I’d finished the final numbers for my launch forecast. Either I was better at hiding my feelings than PJ claimed, or else Neal chalked it up to the usual aftermath of customer drama.

With a tink, tink, tink he knocked on my metal door frame to announce his entrance. “Good morning, Tash.” He glanced at my monitor. “Sorry to interrupt you while you’re neck deep in a spreadsheet, but I need to borrow you for a minute or two.”

Right. A minute or two. I resigned myself to Neal’s usual half hour of sidling up to his point. I saved my work and swiveled my chair to face him. He didn’t sit down, which was… ominous. Instead, he rocked on his heels and alternated finger snaps with driving his right fist into his left palm—a sure sign he was about to ask me to do something that wasn’t remotely connected to my job.

“What can I do for you, Neal?”

Snap snap punch. Snap snap punch. “The thing is, Tash, morale is down.” I made a noncommittal noise. “We need to raise everyone’s spirits. Fire people—”

“Fire people?” The hairs on my neck lifted. “How do layoffs boost morale?”

Neal laughed a little too long. “You’re such a kidder, Tash. Fire people up. Get ’em excited.”

“Excited about what?”

“About their jobs. About the company. You know, put the fun in functional.” He beamed at me, clearly waiting for a response.

I had nothin’. I just blinked at him.

“Right.” Snap snap punch. “Excellent. Glad we’re on the same page. Give me your recommendations by… shall we say… end of the week?”

Maybe I was still disoriented by Ava’s death, but Neal was making even less sense than usual. “Recommendations about what?”

“Morale boosters, Tash. Excitement builders. Fun!”

I took a steadying breath. “Neal, you do realize that I’m in the middle of a major project launch and that our biggest trade show is only two months away?”

“So? It’s not like this is work. You do this kind of stuff all the time.”

“Neal—”

“Just think about it. I’m sure you’ll have a dozen ideas before lunchtime.” He bared his teeth in his used-car-salesman smile. “Then all you’ll have to do is put ’em in motion.”

I smoothed my donut-print skirt over my knees—it was the only thing keeping me from throttling my boss. “Neal, I don’t think—”

“Whoa.” Neal widened his eyes at my exposed-gear wall clock in obviously manufactured surprise. “Is that the time? Got a lunch meeting with the executive team. Gotta go.”

He was gone before I could get another word out. Wait until PJ hears about this one.

Oh, goodness. PJ.

Between this morning’s spreadsheet marathon and Neal’s unwanted visit, I hadn’t had a minute to check in on him. He was probably experiencing the same disorientation that I was—he’d discovered Ava, after all.

Neal was right about one thing—it was almost lunchtime. PJ had mentioned the big server project today, but surely Vinh would let him take a lunch break. I’d insist if I had to—PJ’s boss had a tendency to treat his team as though they were still students during finals week, doing all-nighters to finish up projects and subsisting on coffee and vending machine junk food.

At least I can take one thing off his plate. I pulled out my personal cell phone and looked up the contact for my friend who was the executive director of the local cat rescue league. As I was about to connect, my phone buzzed with an incoming call, the screen displaying the fluffy bunny picture I’d assigned to Nikki. “Hey, Nikki.”

“Hi, Tash. It’s Nik— Oh, you already know that.”

“Yup. Caller ID. It’s a thing. What can I do for—” My throat thickened and things went cattywampus again. She doesn’t know. But I didn’t want to deliver the news about Ava over the phone. Besides, the detectives had warned PJ and me not to discuss the case with anyone. Although there was no way timid little Nikki could possibly be a suspect, I didn’t want to risk Bae’s ire—or a possible charge of interfering with an investigation. I cleared my throat and tried to sound normal. “What’s up?”

“I, um, kinda messed up my card. The one from your class. Do you have any more of the kits?”

“No. The class was full enough that I only had a handful left, and I gave those to Graciela to sell at the store.”

“Oh.” I could hear the disappointment in Nikki’s voice. “I already checked with Graciela. She said she sold them all already.”

“Really?” Despite everything, my spirits rose a little at that. If my designs were popular enough to sell out in a couple of days, maybe my dream of ditching the corporate world for my true passion wasn’t as far off as I feared. Suddenly, I had an itch to talk to Graciela about who had bought the kits, and whether there had been any more demand. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll head over to the store now and put together a few more kits. Then I’ll ask Graciela to put one aside just for you, and you can pick it up when you get off work. You can swing by Central Paper on your way home, right?” Nikki was the bookkeeper for her father’s bookstore.

“Sure. Could you ask her to save two for me? Just in case I screw up again?”

I chuckled—the first time I’d been even tempted to laugh all day. “Of course. I’m about to take a lunch break. I’ll text you when everything’s available.”

“Oh, thank you, Tash. I’m sorry I’m such a bother—”

“You’re not. Every crafter takes a misstep now and then. I won’t bore you with tales of all my projects that didn’t turn out the way I’d planned.”

“Yeah, but when your projects don’t turn out according to plan, you turn them into something even better.”

“That’s nice of you to say, honey, but—”

“It’s the truth! Even Ava said so.”

My breath caught and my grip tightened on my phone. Why is she using past tense for Ava? But I shook myself as though I were shedding bad thoughts like Portland’s inevitable raindrops. Nikki was probably just referring to a statement Ava had made in the past, not that Ava herself was in the past.

Even though she was.

“I’ve got to run. I’ll let you know when you can pick up your card kits.”

“Thank you, Tash. Really. For this and the other night and, well, everything.”

“Sure, honey. Talk to you soon.”

As I tossed my phone in my bag, I spotted Neal and Gil, our CFO, in earnest conversation outside Gil’s office. They both glanced my way, so before they could pounce on me and ask me to do something else that was totally outside my job description, I high-tailed it out of my office and took the elevator down to the basement where Vinh lorded over the IT team like the ruler of a subterranean race.

PJ wasn’t at his desk, nor were any of Vinh’s other tech troglodytes. But Jazz, the DBA, was in their corner cubicle, AirPods visible under their shoulder-length raspberry tipped locs, typing away as they frowned at the three giant monitors on their sit-to-stand desk.

“Hey, friend.” I leaned my palm on their desk—it was in stand mode, but Jazz was a tiny thing, only about five feet nothing on a good day, so standing for them would be more like crouching for me.

They pulled out their AirPods with a grin. “Hey, ma. Looking for your boy?” When I nodded, they gestured to the room. “Vinh’s got everyone at the co-location, freaking out about the new servers.”

“But not you?”

Their big white grin was smug. “It’s Software Patch Tuesday. I’ve got scripts to run. Besides, Vinh knows better than to pull me in on a hardware crisis. Data, yes. Hardware, no.”

“Thanks, Jazz. Good luck with Patch Tuesday.” Of course, now that made me think of the investigation again because of Huber’s quilter wife. Lord, the places my brain could take me.

But my lunch hour was ticking away, so I said goodbye to Jazz and hurried out to my car. I scanned the lot for Moocher, but if PJ was at the co-location, he’d probably have driven. Vinh liked to load the team into his minivan and chauffeur them all like a cranky bus driver, but PJ always resisted. He said it made him feel like he was on a chain gang.

As I drove to Central Paper, I ran through a mental list of required items in addition to the card supplies. With my basic kit impounded, there were a few things I needed. Like most serious crafters, I had a backup kit, but it didn’t have some of the latest and greatest things I’d picked up recently. When I parked next to the store, I realized the one advantage of not having PJ along—he couldn’t give me grief about buying more supplies that he claimed were unnecessary.

I froze, my hand hovering over the ignition button, remembering something I’d heard at a craft show once. A quilter had laughed and said, “We quilters have a saying—she who dies with the most fabric wins.”

Ava had more supplies than any three people. But I couldn’t imagine that her last thoughts before she died were I win.