Authors: John Case
Finally, she took a couple of steps toward him, twirling a daisy between two fingers. She began picking petals off the flower. “He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not. . . .” He watched the petals float to the floor and the way they looked when they settled on it, like white teardrops. It didn’t seem like a good sign.
“I love you so much,” he said. He’d been holding his breath and the words came out in a high-pitched gasp, as if he’d been holding a toke of marijuana in his lungs and was speaking over it. “I love you so much,” he tried again, aiming for a heartfelt tone. This time it came out in a kind of dense Darth Vader whisper.
And he did. He loved her so much. He loved her so much he could hardly stand it. He loved her so much he couldn’t talk. He needed her for survival, like air or water.
“Dew called,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard a word he’d said. Half the daisy’s petals had been torn off. She stopped removing them and twirled the flower back and forth between her thumb and forefinger. “I was really worried about you,” she continued in the same matter-of-fact voice.
“You were?”
“But I’m not sure . . . I’m really not sure about marrying you,” she told him, “if that was actually a proposal.”
What did
that
mean?
It means she’s not going for it,
he thought. He felt cold, frozen, immobilized. He prepared himself for the knockout blow.
Fuck you.
Or maybe just
Good-bye, Danny
. Finally, he managed to speak. “Why not?” This time, his words came out way too loud.
“Well,” she said, “that new tooth, for one thing.” She frowned and shook her head, but a little smile wrecked her attempt at a deadpan delivery. “It’s not a good look for you.”
His hand flew up to his mouth even as relief surged through him.
Then she leaned forward and smiled and tucked the flower behind his ear. “There,” she said, “that’s better.”
ALSO BY JOHN CASE
The Genesis Code
The First Horseman
The Syndrome
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group
Copyright © 2002 by John Case
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing
Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously
in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Case, John.
The eighth day : a novel / John Case
p. cm.
1. Private investigators—Fiction. 2. Washington (D.C.)—Fiction. 3. Rome (Italy)—Fiction. 4. Billionaires—Fiction. I. Title
PS3553.A7914 E37 2002
813′.54—dc21 2002066481
eISBN: 978-0-345-45872-8
v3.0