“So, there’s a new villain in town,” Louise concludes after listening to my rendition of how the dinner with Coraline’s parents went. The moment I stepped into the cafeteria of King’s College campus for lunch, my friends had been on my case, asking for the details of the dinner because I texted them in panic in the group chat, we created once. After that, they had become very interested, and I thought that by today that interest just might be forgotten.But there was no such luck.“I would not go as far as to call it a villain,” Annabelle amends, quirking her head contemplatively, “maybe a new menace.”“What’s the difference?”“I don’t know, but it feels too much calling a land developing company a villain, like, come on! It’s like calling frozen yogurt fantastic. Like, you get to call ice cream fantastic, but frozen yogurt? Come on, it just does not fit!”“I have a lot of questions about your thought process there, also, what the heck had frozen yogurt ever done to you…”Mal rolls hi

Coraline leaves after dinner to meet up with her parents rather than spend the night at my place, saying that she feels like it would be safer if she stayed with them for a few days. I feel so very bad when I see how tired she looks with this new problem piling on top of all the old ones. It’s bad enough we got a stalker on our tails, but land sharks too. Granted, it was technically not my problem, but as long as Coraline associated with me, I would be concerned about it one way or the other.Hell, even if Coraline decides tomorrow that she wants nothing to do with me, breaks our relationship, and resigns from her job, I’m still going to be invested. She was that important.Lemon, who had made himself scarce throughout the dinner, opted to let us have some ‘couple-y time’ rather than stay and be the third wheel. His words, not mine. He’d gone out by the looks of it, a soft-looking, dark-colored leather jacket draped over his shoulders and wearing a scruffy pair of dusty shoes. Althoug

“Are they freaking following us?!” Lemon screams, whipping his head to look over his shoulder as we raced down the road, trying to get away from the hooligans who are now in pursuit. If it was just them and just us, we don’t have to worry about running away, but they have the power of a car behind them, and that will not work in our favor.I am trying to keep a clear head and weave through the narrower roads away from the main road in hopes of getting away, all while cursing myself for coming up with this hir-brained scheme.“We need to take a hard left,” I inform Lemon, trying to catch my breath from the late-night workout, “the car is parked about two streets away, if we get there we can out-drive them!”“How do you know that? I can't tell anything because of the dark and these stupid, look-alike roads! Oh, but suburbs are a nightmare!”“Stop being so dramatic! And turn left now!”We turn left, nearly running into a trash cab due to the momentum and start to pound our feet to the as

Monday comes and I get a call to meet Eriksson for the business regarding the Falenridge case.“Your boys and girls are finally getting some momentum,” he notifies me as he scrolls through the news articles and social media posts about my friendly eco-conservationists on his laptop, “I’m impressed. Your social media person is doing a really good job, managing to get them going literally out of nothing.We sit in his office with a cup of sweet-smelling coffee in front of each one of us. It’s nearly noon, but I haven’t been able to get much sleep lately, so I feel really tired. Everything that was happening weighed on my mind, and I feel like I’m slowly becoming an insomniac. It had been three days since the incident with the vandals and I’d found myself going to spy around the Grangers’ brownstone last night, careful not to be seen by the brand-new security cameras they’d installed, and made sure not to have Lemon follow me. Not that he would, because after that first espionage trip, h

It’s a colder night than ever before, I notice the moment I step out of the estate that belongs to my father. I stick my hands in my pocket and keep myself from second-guessing this plan.Catching a late-night transport, I arrive at the neighborhood that is the victim to the scheming of the company Astra Development, and take my usual place away from the cameras, walking around as if I’m someone who belongs in one of the quaint houses.The headlights appear from the end of the road, and the hooligans come to disturb the neighborhood. This time, however, they don’t just bother the Granges. They pay attention to the house next to them as well.I watch with curiosity, as this is a new development. It seems like Astra Development is having problems with the Grangers’ neighbors as well. The hooligans desecrate their yard, and I take as many pictures as I could, hiding behind a group of trees right in front of them on the other side of the road. The hooligans hoot and holler, and before the