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Whatever it was, it felt good. She liked it.
“So now that we do have more experience, as you say, maybe we raise the stakes of this investigation.” Wil started filling the dessert plates.
“You mean a bet.” Katie raised an eyebrow. “To pile on the spicy.”
Wil laughed. “Right. I mean, it has to be interesting.”
“Well, to beinteresting,we both have to get vulnerable.” Katie put half a roll in her mouth. “This is what I’ve learned from acting. Only human vulnerability is interesting and creates stakes. Everything else is dull.”
Wil had a million TikTok followers who agreed with Katie 100 percent. But probably Katie didn’t know about her TikTok.
This didn’t seem like the moment to mention it.
“Where do you want to hash this out?” Wil asked.
“Come sit with me on the sofa with the mallards on it. It’s really fucking comfortable.”
Wil gave Beanie her desserts and accepted her compliments for entertaining Katie, and then she took her own giant piece of pie and peanut butter cookie and sat beside Katie on the mallard sofa.
Wil remembered this sofa from the Prices’ old house. They’d moved it to the new house, probably because it was the best sofa Wil had ever sat on. It made her want to slide underneath it and write her name on some part of the framing so that, when the Prices wore it out and carried it to the curb to donate, they’d see Wil’s dibs and give her a call to pick it up.
Katie pulled her legs up into crisscross applesauce and turned completely sideways to face Wil. “I have a confession.”
“Good. What could it be, famous actress Katie Price who I haven’t seen in thirteen years, that you have to confess to me?”
Wil’s wry tone made Katie look up from her plate, her mouth almost smiling in a way that put Wil on alert. “I’ve seen your TikTok.”
Wil closed her eyes. Yeah. Yeah, that was a good confession. She liked that. “When you say you’ve seen it…”
“I mean I look at it twice a week. Every time you post.”
Goodgoddamn. “That makes it so easy for me to know what I want to bet.”
Katie was looking right at Wil, making perfect eye contact, her cheeks almost red and her eyes incredibly soft. “I’m willing to put that on the line.”
Wil did not, for one moment, believe that Katie meant what she was saying. But it didn’t matter. This, like their plan to ride around in the Bronco later, was all for fun. Part of what made it fun was knowing there weren’t anyrealstakes.
Wil told herself.
And tried to believe.
“You would come on my TikTok and be my Wednesday. Or Saturday.” Wil could not let herself think too hard about this proposition right now, on the mallard sofa, in the middle of Diana and Craig Price’s holiday party. She was going to have to save it for when she was alone in her bedroom.
The thing that Katie probably didn’t understand—or maybe she did, but Wilreallydid, in every part of her body—was how long a minute lasted when you were kissing someone for the first time.
“I would if I lost,” Katie clarified. “If I’m wrong about Mr. Cook, and he’s not just having an affair, because he has a whole second family.” Katie’s voice was a little rough. She hadn’t stopped looking at Wil. “But you know this would explode your entire life.”
“Maybe my life needs exploding.” Wil meant for this to be a line—the kind of thing she might say to catch someone’s attention—but it didn’t sound like that, and she was tuned in enough to Katie’s changes of expression to watch Katie’s gaze sharpen as the words landed.
Maybe my life needs exploding.
Of course her life needed exploding. Wil wasn’t even meant to be here.
Katie had left for Chicago, bound from there to Asheville to Los Angeles with a possible stop-off in New York City, and Wil had gone to Michigan. She was supposed to have gone to law school after that. She was supposed to have clerked for the Supreme Court.
She was supposed to be somewhere else, doing something else. Something big.
But her dad had died, just like they’d always known he would, and Wil had stayed in Green Bay, even though that was never the plan.