The Semi-Sweet Hereafter Read Free Page B

cream buns, and more.
    Now, though, after hours, Primrose’s display platters and vintage cake stands had been removed. The windows stood empty.
    I beelined down the tight alleyway behind Primrose and double-checked the back door, too. It was similarly secure.
    I called Phoebe and left her a message saying so, trying not to feel irked at having been sent on a wild-goose chase. She didn’t pick up, probably because her upper-crust soirée had taken a turn for the raucous. Don’t let anyone tell you that the English aristocracy don’t know how to party. The dark circles under my eyes proved otherwise. I hadn’t gotten a truly solid night’s sleep since coming to London to consult at Primrose.
    See, I’m not just chocolate whispering for Phoebe. I’m staying at her place, too—at the guesthouse adjacent to her fancy-pants Georgian town house a few streets over, in fact.
    The accommodations came with the job. While I can hold my own in the financial department, I can’t just conjure up an eighteenth-century crash pad full of antiques and luxuries for myself. So when Phoebe offered, I accepted. She hinted there’d be cocktails and tea parties, an introduction to her sought-after celebrity chef hubby and an opportunity to network with her well-connected friends. But I’d been sold at the words “four-poster in the bedroom” and “claw-footed tub in the bath.”
    I might be a sneaker-wearing, chocolate-whispering bohemian most of the time, but I’m secretly a Jane Austen heroine at heart. Aren’t all women, given the opportunity? So I said yes.
    Now, with visions of that old-timey bathtub swimming in my head, I rearranged my grocery bags, left the alleyway, and headed east. The Wright residence stood only a few streets from the chocolaterie-pâtisserie, on a quiet avenue chockablock with similarly grand terraced town houses equipped with white Doric-columned stone façades, dentiled cornices, wrought-iron railings, and enormously imposing six-paneled front doors.
    Not that I was going in by the front door, of course. I ducked into another passageway, maneuvered past a fading lilac bush, and pushed open the Wrights’ back gate. Their walled garden (“yard” to a Yank like me) was green and welcoming, bordered by primroses (get it?) and cushiony with grass. I trod past that grass on the graveled path, my footsteps crunching in the lengthening shadows. The guesthouse wasn’t far, but reaching it always felt like invading a private space meant for family.
    Me, I’m at home in hotels, in hostels, in yurts, and in bed-and-breakfasts. Growing up with a pair of globe-trotting parents and no siblings, I’d stayed in accommodations ranging from five-star resorts to remote Swiss cabins, from hammocks on a Balinese beach to cramped sleeper cars on European trains. But I hadn’t stayed in anyone’s home for years now. Including my own.
    That’s because I don’t have one. Not really. Not anymore.
    Not that I regretted my wayfaring lifestyle, I reminded myself as I stepped into the guesthouse’s foyer, switched on the lights, and strode to the kitchen to put away my grocery-store finds. I was privileged. I was independent. I was secure.
    I was staring at a dead man on the floor.
    Again. Oh, God. No no no no.
    I blinked, but he was still there. Unmoving. Unbreathing. Unlikely to be simply napping in that awkward slumped position on my guesthouse’s blood-streaked tiles. On the verge of freaking out, I hauled in a deep breath and tried to evaluate the situation calmly. That’s what I’d promised myself I’d do in the (very) unlikely event that anything like this ever came up again.
    I failed. Mostly because of the blood. It was just . . .
    Too much. I dropped everything and grabbed my phone.
    I needed help, and I needed it now. Because if I wasn’t mistaken, Travis’s homicidal-incidence-per-population odds