As Good As Dead (A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, #3)

by Holly Jackson

They’d done it. It was over. She kept her face neutral, but there was a fizzing by the sides of her mouth, an invisible smile and a silent sigh. He was asking her where she was between nine-thirty p.m. and midnight because that was the estimated time of death. They’d done it. They’d pushed it back by more than three hours and she was safe. She’d survived. And Ravi, and everyone she’d turned to for help, they would be OK too. Because Pip couldn’t possibly have killed Jason Bell; she’d been somewhere else entirely.

She closed her eyes and made a new silent promise to him, because he had chosen her and she had chosen him: they were going to get away with it.

She better omfg.

“I suppose if you were ever involved in anything like this,” he said, the after-laugh smile still on his face, “you’d know exactly how to get away with it.”

She still spoke to Ravi every day. Not the real one—the one who lived in her head. She spoke to him when she was scared or unsure, asked him what he would do if he were there. He sat beside her when she was lonely, and she was always lonely, looking at old photos on her phone. He told her goodnight and kept her company in the dark while she learned how to sleep again. Pip wasn’t sure anymore if she was getting the timbre of his voice quite right, the exact way he had leaned into his words, whether they lilted or tilted. How had he said “Sarge” again? Had his voice dipped up or dipped down? She had to remember, she had to hold on, preserve him. She thought about Ravi every day, almost every moment of every day, eighty-nine days full of moments. What he was thinking, what he was doing, whether he’d like the sandwich she’d just eaten—the answer was always yes—whether he was OK, whether he missed her as much as she missed him. Whether that absence had grown into resentment.