I stopped midstride, finally becoming intimately acquainted with true, paralyzing mortification.

He stifled a chuckle as he set his cup aside and started for the bathroom.

“Aunt Lillian!” I yelled, summoning her to me instantly. Aunt Lillian had died in the sixties. She’d been elderly at the time, but she didn’t let that stop her from enjoying the flower child generation complete with love beads and a floral muumuu. I’d always figured a hit of acid at her age could not have been good.

“Pumpkin head!” she said, her tone as hollow and insincere as her dentureless mouth. She wasn’t even looking at me. Her gaze instantly sought out the son of evil. Locked on to him like a laser-guided missile.

He tossed her a wink as he strode past, and I thought she was going to melt right then and there.

“Aunt Lillian,” I whispered accusingly. “I thought you didn’t even like my husband that much.”

“Oh, pumpkin, I’ve seen him naked. What’s not to like?” She wiggled her brows, and I gaped, appalled. Appalled that, for once in my life, I had no argument. No sarcastic comeback. No snippy comment. Because she was right as rain on a scorched desert.

I looked my husband over once again. Watched his back muscles ripple with each step he took. Our apartment was much bigger now, so it took a lot of steps to get to the bathroom. A lot of rippling.

One of those ripples was inside me. A ripple of unease. So much had changed. Way more than I was comfortable with. Which brought me to the third, but far from final, reason for my gloom. My husband hadn’t touched me in days. Since we got back, in fact. Normally, he had trouble touching anything besides me, but he hadn’t offered his services in over a week. A very long, very lonely week, made even lonelier when I’d been blindsided by a receipt I stumbled upon. He’d made a payment to the Texas Child Support Division.

He was paying child support.

He had another child.

I closed my eyes again, trying to figure out if I ever really knew the man I married.

2

You can’t control everything.

Your hair was put on your head to remind you of that.

—MEME

Just as Reyes was about to disappear into the bathroom for a visit with George the shower, the front door crashed open. It banged against the wall, and I jumped all the way to the twenty-four-foot ceiling. At least it felt that way.

Reyes, completely unalarmed, paused to watch Cookie, a curvy thirtysomething goddess with short black hair and a challenged sense of accessories, and her lovely daughter, Amber, a tall, slender, thirteen-going-on-seventy-year-old with long, dark locks and delicate, wing-shaped eyebrows, practically stumble over themselves to get inside. A quick glance told me Reyes found them amusing, if the sexy tilt of his mouth was any indication.

I, on the other hand, was still searching for my heart. I glanced back up at the ceiling. No heart there, but the blond boy dangling his feet where three thick metal beams converged was still there. He’d been hanging out since I got back a week ago and had yet to talk to me. Or anyone, for that matter. Had he always been there and we’d just never seen him? Stuck in the storerooms on the roof? Had he died there? No one found a body during the renovations that I knew of, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t have been killed there and dumped somewhere else.

Once Cookie and Amber settled in front of me—Amber’s face full of excited intrigue, Cookie’s full of horror, but that was pretty much her morning look until she got some rocket fuel in her—I tore my attention off the boy and offered it to them.

They started talking at the same time, each interrupting the other over and over until it was impossible to tell who was speaking at any given moment.

Cookie started it off with a “There’s something you have to see.”

Then Amber chimed in. “It’s everywhere.”

It went downhill from there.

“You won’t believe—”

“I think you should—”

“So many hits—”

“It’s crazy—”

“You’ll be—”

“You’ll be—”

“—famous.”

“—exposed.”

“This is awesome!”

“This is so bad.”

I finally reached up and gently placed a hand over each of their mouths. They hushed instantly, then Cookie mumbled, “Fine. Amber can tell you.”

Appeased, I lowered my hands. Amber giggled, risked a quick glance at the hotness walking back our way, then shoved her phone into my hands.