That sounded like Bette. I nodded.

“But I’ve been sort of… asking around and it seems that you’re pretty close to her, so I thought-”

“That if I went with you, Bette might give you a fairer shot.” She indicated that this what she meant and I sighed. Bette listened to me sometimes, but if she didn’t want to hear something, there wasn’t a lot I could do about it.

Still. I liked Kit. And I respected her plans and decisions. More than that, I loved Bette and it seemed that making amends with her sister would be a good thing for Bette in the long run, so I agreed.

Kit expressed her thanks in the same cool, nonexistent way her sister had, which made me grin. I stood up. “Do you have somewhere to stay?”

“I was gonna call up a friend.”

It wasn’t my place to assume, of course, but Kit’s friends could very well be drinkers, and maybe it wasn’t the best idea to let her stay with them. It seemed like the smart sort of thing Bette would think. I said, “You can crash here,” and Kit agreed.

“We can go over to Bette’s in the morning,” I said. She followed me into the bedroom where I searched for something she could sleep in. “We were supposed to meet for breakfast anyway. It’s my birthday.”

“Happy birthday,” Kit said with a great smile.

I glanced at the clock. It was after midnight. “Thanks. You want the bed, or…”

“Nah. I don’t want to put you out.”

“You couldn’t.”

***

The next morning, I was an entire year older (or, really, I was just a day older and had a new age to talk about) and Kit and I got coffee at The Planet and then drove over to Bette’s. It was weird. It wasn’t too long ago that Bette was driving us over to Kit’s place with coffee so that I could get my interview, and here we were, five million events later and I still felt sort of in the middle of things.

Kit loitered on the front porch while I juggled the coffees and knocked. Bette came to the door, yawning and pulling her robe on.