I nodded. “Hello, Elodie. What did you cook for dinner tonight? It smells good in here.”

She smiled. “Hello, Hollis. Thank you. We made sauce, with meatballs and sausage.”

“You keep this up, and I’m going to have to spend an extra hour at the gym.”

Elodie’s eyes did a quick sweep down my body, but she didn’t comment. Instead her eyes returned to Hailey. “Why don’t you slide the game down the table, and we’ll finish it up another day?”

The Scrabble board was half full, and I read one of the words spelled out with the tiles.

Youniverse? “Uhhh… Is that supposed to be universe?”

My niece smiled. “Nope. Y-O-U-niverse. It’s a person who’s full of themselves and thinks the world revolves around them.”

My forehead wrinkled. I read another word on the board.

Carcolepsy? “What the hell is carcolepsy?”

Hailey answered again. “It’s what an annoying passenger who falls asleep as soon as they get in the car with you has.”

I read another. “Snoot?”

“It’s the dirty, sooty looking snot that comes out of your nose after you’ve been playing in dirt.”

“Internest?”

“The big pile of blankets you bury yourself in when you don’t feel like getting out of bed and you spend the day surfing the Web.”

I chuckled. “Interesting Scrabble game.”

Elodie stood. “It’s more fun to play with made-up words.”

“If you say so.”

Hailey pushed the board game down to the end of the table, and Elodie went to the kitchen. She took the lid off a pot and stirred. “It’s ready when you are. There’s angel hair pasta in the cabinet to have with it. You just need to boil water.”

“Thank you. If it’s half as good as the shrimp thing you made last night, I’ll be in a food coma by eight.”

Elodie smiled. “Well, I made extra since we won’t have time to cook tomorrow.”

“Do you guys have other plans or something?”

Her smile wilted to a frown. “Tomorrow is the year-end family picnic.”

“The what?”

She walked past me and into the dining room. “Hailey? Did you forget to tell your uncle about the picnic at school?”

My niece shrugged. “I didn’t think he’d want to go.”

Elodie sighed. “It starts at three o’clock, right after school.”

Great. Smack in the middle of the damn day. I had to check my calendar, but I was pretty sure I had a meeting at four. My face must’ve given away that the time wasn’t exactly convenient.

“It’s fine,” Hailey said. “Elodie is going to come. You don’t have to.”

Well, now I felt like a dick. “No, of course I’ll be there.”

Elodie told Hailey to go finish her homework, and the two of them said goodbye.

“I’ll walk you out,” I said.

Just like yesterday, we waited until we were in the hallway and out of earshot from prying ears.

“Thank you for the heads-up about the cell phone software.”

She nodded. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I closed my account, so neither of us can listen to each other’s calls anymore. Since she hasn’t brought it up, I think I’m going to leave it be and see if we can just move on.”

Elodie pushed the button to call the elevator. “I think that might be best. Can I ask what you were hoping to hear by listening in on her conversations?”

“After I found out my brother was in prison, I told her where he was. I didn’t want her thinking the worst. She asked if she could talk to him, so I put some money on a prisoner calling account so my loser brother could call his kid.” I shook my head. “I don’t know what I was hoping to hear when he called.”

Elodie smiled. “I can understand why you’d do it, of course. But you’re going to have to have a little trust in her, if you want her to have a little trust in you. We haven’t talked about him yet, but I’m sure she’s angry at her father for abandoning her and getting himself in trouble. I’m guessing she also feels like there’s no one in this world she can depend on and trust.”

I blew out a deep breath. “And her finding out I was doing shit behind her back just added to that.”

She nodded and the doors slid open. “You’ll get there. Look at how well you’re doing with using words for greetings already.”

I chuckled. “How come you can let things slide with Hailey, but you have to call me out on everything?”

She stepped into the elevator and pushed the button on the panel. “For the same reason Hailey and I get along. We both want to make all men pay for the sins of others.”

The doors started to slide closed, but Elodie jabbed a button on the panel to keep them open.

“We’ve discussed Hailey’s father, but you never mentioned why her mom is no longer in the picture. What exactly happened there?”