Time to end this. “So, anything to drink?” Kristi asked. “Coffee?”

Thankfully, Lucretia and her group picked up their menus and rattled off their choices.

“Two sweet teas, a Diet Coke, and a coffee. Got it,” Kristi said, thankful to hurry back to the kitchen. Who would have thought that Lucretia would have kept up with her, or her father? Kristi and Lucretia hadn’t kept in touch over the years; in fact, while living together, they hardly spoke. They’d had nothing in common before. Kristi doubted that had changed over the years.

“Old friends?” Ezma, a waitress with mocha-colored skin and impossibly white teeth, asked as she filled plastic glasses with shaved ice from a rumbling ice machine positioned near the soda dispenser. Ezma, barely five feet and a hundred pounds, was a part-time student and full-time waitress, a wife, and a mother of a precocious two-year-old.

“I guess.” Kristi took three of the glasses and filled two from the pitcher of sweetened iced tea, then pushed a button on the soda machine and filled the final glass with diet cola, holding the dispenser button a second too long. The soda fizzled over the top. Sweeping a towel from a nearby hook, she swabbed at the spilled cola and topped off the glass. “One of the women”—she hitched her chin toward the table where Lucretia seemed to be holding court—“was my roommate when I first enrolled at All Saints, back before the turn of the millennium.”

“Let me guess—Lucretia Stevens,” Ezma said, sliding a glance toward the table.

“How did you know?”

“I guess I’m just omniscient.”

“Yeah, right.” Kristi smiled faintly.

“And”—she lifted a slim shoulder—“I eavesdrop.”

“That’s more like it.”

Ezma laughed as she grabbed the dispenser handle for the water hose and filled the remaining glasses. “Actually, I had her for one of my classes, writing two twelve, I think it was.”

“She’s a professor?”

“Assistant.”

Kristi was stunned. She’d always known Lucretia was a perpetual student, but she’d never imagined she would actually stick around All Saints to teach.

“And I think she’s involved with someone at the university. Another professor.”

“Really?”

So much for Lucretia’s college boyfriend, whom she’d pined about for the year Kristi had known her.

“Well, I have to admit, if I weren’t a happily married woman, I might be interested. Some of the professors are hot!”

Kristi remembered some of her teachers from the past. Weird Dr. Northrup, edgy Dr. Sutter, and crusty, superior Dr. Zaroster. All of them were musty, slightly crotchety academics who suffered from superiority complexes. Definitely not “hot.” Not even lukewarm. At least not in Kristi’s vocabulary. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“Uh-uh. I’m tellin’ you, the staff at All Saints is something. At least the English Department. It’s as if whoever was recruiting was looking at Hollywood head shots.”

“Now I know you’re full of it.”