Doubt filled his eyes, but then he blinked and it was gone. “No. What I remember was them talking, kissing, laughing, crying. I remember them being alive. So, no,” he said with the assuredness she wanted … she needed … to hear. “I don’t believe it. We’ve been them. We’ve felt what they feel. They aren’t dead. They’re alive.”
“But what if we’re wrong?” Della’s stomach knotted. “What if they just want us to know?”
“Know what?”
“I don’t know … maybe that they loved each other.”
He shook his head and then moved to her and put a hand on each of her shoulders. “They are alive. I believe that.”
“I want to believe it.” A tear slipped from her lashes.
He pulled her against him. She rested her head on his bare shoulder, gathering comfort and strength in his embrace, by his nearness. But she hadn’t come for this. She knew what she needed to do. What she felt almost certain the ghost wanted her to do.
She pulled back. “I need you to loan me your car.”
“To go where?”
“I’m going to see my aunt.”
“Because of the picture?” he asked.
“Because the ghost wants me to.”
He reached back to the wicker chair and snagged his phone and then grabbed a T-shirt that hung off the back. “Did she tell you this … that she wanted you to go to your aunt?”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of how?” he asked.
She held out her hand. “Are you going to loan me your car, or not?”
“No. I’m going to come with you,” he said. “But I want to know what’s really going on first.” At her small nod, he looked back to the door. “Let me grab my keys and shoes. You can tell me on the drive.”
* * *
She gave Chase the address and he punched it into his GPS. He asked her if she wanted the top up or down. She said up, just because she was afraid of being this close to her old neighborhood and being spotted by someone else who knew her.
She sat in the front seat, her mind spinning with different ways to ask her aunt questions. Questions about Natasha. Questions about her uncle and aunt who her father never told her about. Then she had to figure out a way to ask her aunt not to tell her dad that she’d been there.
“Explain ‘sort of,’” Chase said, interrupting her thoughts.
“Huh?”
“How did the ghost ‘sort of’ tell you to go see your aunt?”
When she didn’t answer right away, he spoke again. “Talk to me, Della.”
“She called. The day we were in Natasha’s closet, she called.”
“Your aunt called you?”
“No, she called Natasha’s mom. Don’t you remember the music stopped and the loudspeaker announced a call from Miao Hon?”
His eyes grew a little wider. “That was Chan’s last name. I didn’t put it together. Miao’s your aunt?”
She nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I forgot,” she lied, not caring that her heart echoed the mistruth.
He stared at her with a frown. “What did your aunt want with Natasha’s mom?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I think I’m supposed to find out.”
“And why do you think that? Did something else happen?”
She told him about rehearing the message that had played on the Owens’ sound speakers when she’d been talking to Burnett.
“Then it must be important,” Chase said as he cut his eyes back to the road. After a few seconds, he stopped at a red light and looked back at her. “Why are you afraid of your aunt?”
“I’m not afraid of my aunt,” she said.
“Why didn’t you want to go ask her about Natasha’s picture in the beginning?”
She hesitated to answer, but then she just said it. “She’ll tell my dad.”
“Tell him what?” he asked.
“That I went to see her.”
“And that’s a bad thing, why?”
She shook her head and stared straight ahead. “He’s Asian,” she said before she could stop herself.
“What does that have to do with it?”
Feeling uncomfortable, she exhaled and reached down to bring the back of the seat forward. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“I might, if you explained it,” he said.
She got the back of the seat up, then searched beside the door to find the lever to move the entire seat forward. She found it and it squeaked when she shifted it forward.
“What does your father being Asian have to do with you not seeing your aunt?” he prodded.
With the seat adjusted, it still didn’t feel right. That’s when she had to accept it might be the conversation making her so uncomfortable.
In her head, she heard her father’s voice. We don’t expose our dirty laundry.
“He’s embarrassed,” she blurted out, admitting it cost her a big chunk of pride. And instantly she wanted that chunk back.
“Embarrassed about what?”
“Me,” she said, knowing she couldn’t take the comment back and wanting to get this conversation over with.
“What? Why … I don’t get it.”
She swallowed the hurt. “I’m … different now. Or … he thinks I am. Hell, I am different. Just not in the ways he thinks. Can we not talk about this anymore?”