“Almost perfect,” I shouted into the kitchen, taking a sip of the freshly brewed tea.
“Almost?” the reply came from deep in the fridge. “Too much milk?”
“Not the tea, this,” I said, motioning to the room.
It was a Sunday afternoon. The TV was on in the background, gently playing out some American cookery show where a homely woman was baking gigantic cinnamon buns in the biggest oven I had ever seen in my life. I was still in my pajamas. As I watched her drizzle horizontal lines of icing over them in one smooth motion, a hand placed a plate of hot buttered toast onto the coffee table. I reached for the biggest slice.
“I’ll take this one, on account of all my post-traumatic stress,” I said, taking a huge bite.
“So, what’s missing?” Aubrey lowered himself next to me on the sofa. “Jam? You had sod-all in the fridge.”
I ignored the question. I hadn’t told Aubrey exactly how it had gone down in the church, but I’d let him take credit for solving the whole thing, and saving Noah and Richard, so that had bought me some brownie points.
It had been two weeks, and the police were closing in on Sarah. They knew she’d flown to Vancouver from Gatwick, but so far she’d managed to avoid detection. I’d been assured the Canadian CSIS had their very best people on it, and it was only a matter of time before she was caught. When that happened, I knew I’d have to answer a lot more questions. But for now, the sun was shining. It was spring at last.
Charlie had been given a suspended sentence. Richard had sold his story to the Mail Online. I got my old job back. Amazingly, thanks to Noah’s foresight to get the highest liability, the insurance paid out on the van, and I hadn’t needed to get a new flatmate just yet.
Holding the toast between my teeth, I opened up my phone. There was Connector, sitting unopened, unloved, and unneeded. I hadn’t had the strength to even think about it. Every time I accidentally saw the app on my screen, I quickly put my phone away and did something else.
I took a deep breath and pressed on the Connector logo with my thumb. Shielding the screen from Lyons’s eyes, I set the distance to the lowest possible setting and waited as it searched for any available profiles. The app’s little thinking wheel whirred round on the screen. After about ten long, long seconds, a message popped up: No profiles found. Why not try widening your search?
“So, how’s it going on Connector then?” I asked. “Any matches?”
Aubrey ran a hand through his hair. “It’s embarrassing, but I downloaded it because I thought maybe, just maybe, I was feeling ready to meet someone again. You know, after Olivia, things were hard. People are weird about dating coppers.”
“Let me get this straight. A murder spree spurred on by a dating app hit you right in the feels? You feeling okay, Aubrey?”
“It wasn’t because of the case,” he said.
“So, you met someone already?” I asked, holding up my phone to show him the screen. “That was quick.”
He looked away, and I swear his cheeks blushed a little.
“I thought maybe I had, yeah,” he said.
I stared at him, wide-eyed.
“You mean me?” I coughed. “Because of that night at the station? Oh, Aubrey, don’t get too hasty. I’d drunk half a bottle of Malibu, seen two dead bodies, and just crashed twelve thousand pounds’ worth of ice cream van. I’m not sure I’d start looking for an engagement ring just yet.”
He looked a little crestfallen.
“What about Olivia?” I said. “I thought you were going back to London to sweep her off her feet?”
“You know, I used to think I was still in love with her,” he said. “Maybe I always will be, a little bit. But I don’t think anything I do will change the fact that she wasn’t in love with me. So I have to let it go. Move on. But that doesn’t mean I have to turn off my emotions, or that I can’t ever love anyone else ever again. I just have to learn how to do it differently. And I thought maybe I had.”
He looked across at me with a hopeful smile.
“So, just to one hundred percent clarify, you’re not a catfishing bloodthirsty psychopath?” I asked.
“No,” Aubrey said. “That would really be a setback in my career as a homicide detective.”
“Hmm, okay, but why should I believe anything you say?” I smiled.
He thought for a moment. “Gwen, remember in Year Ten when you did that Shakira dance routine?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But what has that got to do with—”
“It was bloody awful,” he said. “See, I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“Huh, well, you know, I never wanted to admit it, but you’re right. Maybe it was a little underrehearsed. Okay, fine, I believe you. You’re far too boring to be a serial killer anyway.” I grinned at him.
“So, remember we talked about going somewhere, somewhere that isn’t a dingy police station?”
“Or a decrepit fishing boat?” I said.
“What about a nice trip on the Eastbourne Eye?”
“Too soon, Aubrey,” I said. “Too soon.”
“All right, what about that pub you like, the Brown Derby?”
I thought about it for a second. I could feel the butterflies in my stomach again, and this time I didn’t feel the urge to stamp on them.
“Are you asking me out on a date?” I asked.
“You’re a better detective than I am,” he said, smiling. “You work it out.”
I’d always thought of Noah as an anchor, holding me safely in place. I realized now, yeah, he was an anchor, all right—he was never letting me sail away. But now I really was ready to move on. Sure, I was definitely going to make a million more bad choices in my life, but from now on, I was going to start taking responsibility for them.
I looked down at my phone. My thumb hovered over the Connector logo, two little linking chains, one pink, one blue. I pressed it, and held my thumb there until a little message popped up on the phone screen that asked: Delete app?
Aubrey peered over my shoulder. “Finally doing it, huh?” he said.
I took another bite of toast and put the slice back on the plate.
“Well, what do you reckon?”