All That Really Matters, Nicole Deese [best detective novels of all time .TXT] 📗

believed she was a fake and why I’d never in a billion years take life advice from a manipulative cheat like her. . . . But instead, I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth.

And then I deleted her poison.

The instant her message was cleared from view, a local number I didn’t recognize lit up my screen. I swiped left and sent it to my voicemail. Not thirty seconds later, my phone vibrated with a waiting audio message.

I clicked to listen to the recording. Within the first syllable, I knew exactly who it was, and I smiled when his dignified and professional voice came through my phone speaker. I immediately saved his contact information as The Duke of Fir Crest Manor.

“Hello, Molly, this is Silas Whittaker. I’d like to follow up with you when you have a few minutes, regarding today’s mentor meeting with the young ladies. I apologize that I wasn’t on campus this afternoon to ask you in person. Please give me a call at your earliest convenience. Thank you.”

I couldn’t help the laughter that bubbled up inside me. Why Silas had felt the need to tell me his last name, I’d never know. There was only one Silas in my world who spoke like a nobleman, and he was it.

I called him back.

He answered on the first ring. “Hello, this is Silas.”

“Hello, Silas, this is Molly McKenzie.” I fought the laugh behind my voice. “How are you?”

“I’m well, and yourself?”

I smiled at the properness of it all and then immediately regretted the action. My face suddenly felt like it was being sucked through a vacuum hose. “Ouch.” The mask tightened around my mouth, nose, chin, and eyes. What kind of torture device was this?

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, sorry. I just have—ouch—something stuck to my face.”

I could almost imagine the crinkle forming in the middle of his forehead as he worked to interpret what I was saying, because I’d suddenly become the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz in desperate need of his oil can.

“As in . . . what exactly?” he asked.

“A mask.” I scraped and tugged at the dried peel under my chin. It didn’t budge. Obviously, this mask had been mismarked, seeing as this was the opposite of a self-care routine. It was more like a bad prank.

“Isn’t it a little early for that?”

“Huh?” I squeezed my watering eyes closed.

“Halloween. It’s only June.”

At this, I stopped all futile attempts at peeling back a mask that refused to be peeled so I could fully register his words. And once I did, I lost it—completely undone by the thought of Silas envisioning me lying on my sofa on a random Friday night in June with a Halloween mask stuck to my face. “No, no. Not . . .” I couldn’t catch my breath. “. . . a . . . costume. . . .”

“What? Molly, I can’t understand you.”

“A beauty mask,” I said through a wheeze. The tightness in my face cracked at the untamed laughter, releasing approximately ten percent of its death grip on my skin. “It’s black like tar and made from a dead sea urchin that lives in some special sea.”

“In some special sea? Sounds complex. Although I’m still unsure why you’d choose to apply it in the first place. Isn’t your face a critical part of your . . . of whatever it is you do online?”

I couldn’t stop. Tears poured from my eyes for a whole new reason now. Picturing Silas’s expression, a look of shocked horror at the words I’d just spoken out loud, had to be the funniest thing happening on the planet today.

“If you don’t stop wheezing,” he said, “I’ll be forced to contact the authorities.”

“I can’t even handle this conversation right now.” Tears dripped from the corners of my eyes.

“That makes two of us.”

Incredibly, Silas did not hang up. And even more incredibly, I had the distinct impression that he might actually be enjoying himself. Maybe even as much as I was.

“How exactly does one go about taking something like that off?” he asked.

“It was supposed to peel off with ease,” I said, recalling the words on the package. “But I can assure you, there is no ease happening here.”

“Perhaps you need to apply the Band-Aid strategy to this predicament? Take a deep breath and tear it off.”

He obviously did not understand the severity at hand. “I can tell you with some level of certainly that if I applied that strategy to this, I would lose my nose.”

“So what’s your plan B?”

“Hope it disintegrates by morning?”

Silas laughed, and I laughed with him. And even with a black sea urchin suctioned to my face, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed like this. Weeks? Months?

I sighed. “I’m gonna try a warm washcloth, though I’m fairly sure it’s gone straight through my pores and into my bone structure at this point.”

“A case for job hazard insurance if ever there was one.”

“You could have been a lawyer.”

“I almost was.”

I placed my slippered feet to the floor, shocked by this admission. Not because I couldn’t imagine Silas in a courtroom wearing a pressed three-piece suit and carrying a briefcase. That was pretty much the way I saw him even when he was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. But the fact that he would admit something about himself so openly to me was . . . surprisingly nice.

“Really? Why weren’t you?”

“I realized I could do more for these kids by doing the kind of work I’m doing now. Although, I did pass my bar exam.”

“You passed the bar exam but didn’t practice law?”

“That’s correct. But I have been able to use my understanding of certain policies and practices to help the community I serve.”

Quietly, I padded my way into the bathroom and reached for a fresh washcloth before running it under warm tap water. I hoped the sound wouldn’t interrupt his line of thought, because I wanted to hear whatever Silas was willing to share about his life. It’d been a long time since I had a phone conversation with someone other than Miles or Val. Ethan and I