Chapter 9

B renna put her hands over her face. "Holy Mary," she moaned. "It just gets worse."

"It's not so bad," I chastised my younger sister. "There are only two more boxes."

"Why me?" she asked, but I took it to be a more existential kind of query and not one I actually had to respond to, so I went down to my car to tote in the last of my possessions. The answer to her question was obvious, anyway: I had to get out of my apartment, and there weren't that many places for me to go. I couldn't move in with Nicola, who was recently married and pregnant and was busy living her best life with her husband, Jude. I couldn't move in with Sophie, since her house was a literal dump and anyway, she was spending all her time at my parents' place with our niece (and there was no room in my parents' place, either). Addie was living with the man who'd just become her fiancé. They, obviously, didn't want a third wheel. Not Patrick, because he was couch surfing and running off to Chicago as often as he could. Not Grace, since she also lived at home with our mom and dad—although she'd been spending less and less time there, and no one was exactly sure what she was up to.

That left one person.

"Why me?" Brenna asked again as I put the final boxes down. She sliced one open with a razor blade that gave me a lot of pause, because it wouldn't have been outside the realm of possibility for her to turn that tool onto me if she got mad enough. The two of us were only twenty-one months apart, but we'd never been friends. Brenna hadn't really been friends with anyone in our family, mostly because—

"You have the ugliest wardrobe I've ever seen," she announced as she looked at some of my clothes. "Now your bad taste will be all over my studio and I'm afraid it will infect me, too."

That right there was why no one was friends with Brenna: she was a brat. Brat, with a capital letter, was what we often called her. "My bad taste won't…I don't have bad taste!" I defended myself.

Now she held up some of my shoes. Brenna herself had about three pairs total (for summer and winter), but her meager closet was already stuffed full. "These are hideous," she announced, her nose wrinkling.

"Those were very expensive." Or, they would have been, if they hadn't been the knockoff version.

"It's so true that money can't buy style," she mused, and I grabbed them out of her hand.

"I'm paying you every month," I reminded her, which was the only reason she'd let me temporarily move in. "You'll get some money to buy nice footwear like mine." I was giving her less than the rent that I'd paid at my former place, which I'd had to leave immediately because there had been two police raids and a fire in the final week that I was in residence. Leni and Elissa had taken off after the first appearance by law enforcement, moving their things one day while I'd been at work and not even leaving a note to say goodbye. The second raid (which had been right next door) had been scary enough to make me take off in much the same way. I'd left behind most of my destroyed furniture, which was fine because there wasn't enough room for it in Brenna's studio, anyway. There was hardly enough room for the pair of shoes I was now holding, which were really great and highly stylish no matter what the Brat said about them.

And yes, I could have tried to rent an apartment for myself. I could have gone to a cheap motel, I could have done several things that didn't involve sharing a tiny space with a sister that I didn't get along with too well. But the truth was, I wanted the company (even if it was mean company). I was so jumpy and—

A door slammed somewhere below us and in my shock, I threw my shoes into the air. Unfortunately, since the ceiling was low, they hit it with a big thump and left behind black smudges on the white paint. "Seriously, JuJu?" Brenna yelled. "Get your butt up there and clean that off! I'm not living with the marks of your bad taste above my head."

I did clean, but then I had to get going. Another person had quit and our department was short again, leaving a lot for everyone to catch up on. I was going to do that now, which was a shame because spring had finally arrived for real. It was beautiful out today, the kind of weather that had always made me want to run from the school building to roll in the grass and cavort. Once I'd gotten older, though, I never did much cavorting. I'd had an image to maintain and I'd been very strict about what I did, where I went, and whom I talked to. Rolling in the grass hadn't played into that.

Rolling in the grass wouldn't happen today, either, although I did drive over to Beckett's with the windows down in my new, cruddy car. It wasn't that bad, actually. Yes, it took forever to get from zero to twenty-five, and yes, the vents did seem to blow out the same temperature no matter where I had set the dial, to hot or to cold. Yes, every pothole in the street made various parts of the vehicle rattle as if they would fall off, and yes, the cupholder was not a specialized area in the console but was, in fact, my hand.

But it was nice to get out of Brenna's studio and away from moving, because even though I had left behind the furniture, the process had still sucked. It had been really hard to get everything out of my former apartment, since (as Beckett had prophesized) building maintenance had entered a steep decline. Someone had set up a tent to camp in the lobby, for example, and unfortunately for me, neither the passenger elevator nor the service elevator was working. It meant multiple trips on the stairs (making me glad that I hadn't rented above the second floor). It had been hard to fill my tiny car so many times, walking up and down, but it did mean that I felt ok about skipping the gym for a few days.

Now I was living elsewhere, though, at least temporarily. I didn't kid myself that Brenna and I were going to last for long. In our parents' house, all the girls had shared a bedroom—that probably sounded worse than it really was, because it had been a big space and we'd all had our own bunk. My brother had slept in the room that he currently occupied in that same house, or at least he was supposed to be sleeping there…

Anyway, the six of us girls had shared, and even with the commanding presence of Nicola on site, we had fought like animals. We had attacked each other physically, I meant, although that hadn't happened in years. Certainly, we wouldn't be fighting like that again. I considered that I might have lost my edge, because the Brat wasn't much shorter than I was and if she'd really begun to study martial arts as she'd previously threatened, then I could have been in trouble. Due to swimming and the workouts that went with it, I'd always been stronger, but Brenna fought like a wolverine: mean.

But we wouldn't be fighting, especially not today since I was heading over to Beckett's "house" to work. I felt myself get a little excited at the thought, my heart fluttering and that terrible, oppressive weight on my chest lifting slightly. It had been lying there even more heavily since the gun incident, although nothing had happened since then. Like, I hadn't gotten any texts about deliveries and I hadn't heard a word from Gigi, either. The silence wasn't making me calmer, though. It felt the same as when I'd listened to a swim meet starter tell us to take our marks. In the moment before the horn sounded, every cell in my body had tensed in preparation. I was tense right now too, but nothing provided much relief. I was stuck in the anxiety.

Maybe not today, though, because it was gorgeous weather and Beckett's gigantic "house" wasn't a bad place to work, if you had to do that on a weekend. He'd said we might have to go late and he was planning to order food. The two of us had enjoyed ourselves the last time we'd consumed a meal together, the meal which he'd claimed didn't count as an actual dinner. But today, if we were talking and having fun as we ate, I would definitely call it a dinner and not just consumption. It was almost like…

No, it wasn't a date, since we were working and also, of course, he was my superior. I still heard that word much too frequently around the office.

The gate immediately and smoothly swung open when I pushed the button there, and the "house" looked even more beautiful as spring bloomed around it. I wondered if the lake had warmed up at all, and if I could test it out. I'd seen what I thought was a dock reaching out into the water from his lawn.

"Hi," I said, smiling, as I got out of my new crud car. Beckett stood on his wide, stone steps wearing a different polo shirt but maybe the same jeans from before, and I had to pause for a moment to admire how well he pulled off this look. If the law stuff didn't work out, I would have suggested a career in modeling because it almost didn't seem fair to keep him from the world at large.

"Juliet." He looked at me, his lips slightly parted, and suddenly it felt like that moment was weighty and important. It almost seemed like he was going to say something—

"There's Camille."

"What?" I asked. But I turned, and yes, there she was pulling up in the vehicle that I'd called a piece of crap but was a much nicer piece of crap than the one I now drove. She got out too, and waved at both of us.

"That gate was open so I just drove on in. What a lovely house, Beckett," she told him. "Hey, Juliet. Did you get a new car?"

"Yes." I felt my cheeks start to burn, and it wasn't from the fresh spring sun overhead. I was slightly upset. "Where do you want to set up?" I asked Beckett briskly. I was here to do my job, after all, although I hadn't realized that other people were also joining us.

The two of them did work very well together. We sat in the study, where the desk was large enough to accommodate at least a dozen people, including me as the non-attorney, non-superior. The review of everything that had been "accomplished" under Annis's tenure was now complete. They'd found a few problems, but nothing that threatened any of the company's real estate projects. Now, we were steaming ahead with all new stuff, which was very depressing. It meant that this was the workload that we would always have, indefinitely, unless he managed to hire more people.

"Have you found anyone else to work in our department?" I asked out loud, and my voice sounded strident in this noise-dampened room.

"I have two meetings scheduled next week with potential candidates. Camille, I'd like you to sit in on those. It will be good practice for you, because you'll be conducting the first round of the interviews on your own for the next set of applicants."

She got very excited when she heard that, although I could tell that she tried to disguise it. She was exactly like that kid in class that you always hated because they were besties with the teacher, so they got to do stuff like take notes to the office or always be in charge of escorting fellow classmates to the nurse. Of course, those kids were also the ones who went on to do internships and join the right clubs and get awesome jobs, just like Camille.

She turned to me and smiled a little and I looked back down at the laptop that Beckett had provided. I'd been practicing on typing apps so I was getting a lot faster with that, although I was still not as good as some.

We broke for dinner, which was not actually "dinner" but again just a meal that we consumed together. Beckett had a giant spread delivered and since the weather was still so nice, we went outside to sit at one of the tables on his patio to eat. Afterwards, as the sun was going down, we walked to his breakwall at the edge of the lake.

"Is it deep enough to dive off there?" I asked, looking at the dock.

"Absolutely do not," Beckett immediately ordered, and Camille started a story about someone she knew who'd gone off a boat and ended up hitting his head on the bottom of a river, resulting in a serious injury.

"Obviously, I'm not doing it at this moment," I told them both, very annoyed. "I've spent enough time around water to understand how stupid that would be." I walked out onto the dock to get away from the two geniuses and I heard them continue to discuss the various problems with dives. I tuned them out as I went to the edge to look over. It was peaceful and calm, and it was hard to be angry when it was so lovely here.

"The sunrise is very nice on this dock," Beckett commented from behind me. "It's less charming during fish fly season."

"I can imagine. I'm not going to break my neck, if that's why you're here." I turned back to look and saw Camille walking toward the house.

"I didn't think so." He took another small step and then halted. "I haven't come out here since I arrived in Michigan," he said. He'd shown up in the winter and we hadn't had a ton of good weather since, but it would have been hard for me to keep myself away from this if it were in my back yard. "I'm not a lake person," he continued, and I nodded. I thought of what he'd told me about his mother and brother dying in an accident. He'd said that they'd drowned, and it was logical that he wouldn't have wanted anything to do with water.

"Do you swim at all?" I asked.

"I used to, as a child. Now I try to avoid boats, pools…" He peered off the end of the dock and then straightened quickly. As usual, he didn't show much with his facial expression but I also saw his body tense under that nice polo shirt.

"Let's go back to the patio," I suggested, even though I had been enjoying it out here in the location where Camille wasn't. Although she was supposedly my "superior," tonight it had felt a lot more like she was one of my younger sisters when they had hung around if I'd brought a boy home with me. Grace, especially, had clung like a sloth.

Beckett nodded and we started across the lawn. "This isn't where the accident with my mother happened. It wasn't on this lake," he mentioned, and I looked over at him, a little sorry that he knew where my thoughts had been.

"Where were they?"

"The three of us were vacationing in…" He'd completed the sentence with a few words in what sounded like French and the way he said them made me believe that it was a place I should have recognized. Except, I had never traveled besides for big, taper meets, and those were only around the United States (and once in Canada). Brenna spoke French, but I'd never gotten very far with my own language studies.

He went on. "My mother took my little brother out in a paddle boat, but I was reading and wanted to stay on the beach to finish the book."

"And they just didn't come back?" I imagined a little blonde boy, Beckett, waiting on the shore. Waiting, and waiting, and waiting, all alone.

"She wasn't a strong swimmer and my brother was very young. I don't remember if they were wearing life jackets but I do remember that it was a beautiful day, and that the Mediterranean was so blue and calm. I've never understood how it happened, but I've thought about it a lot. In college, I went to the oceanography department to learn about the currents there and how they were flowing on that day. Because we never found them," he said. His voice was also very calm.

"Holy Mary. No wonder you warned me about diving."

He nodded. "Since then, I've always had qualms around the water. I know you can swim, but I didn't like to see you so close to the edge." We walked silently over the grass, coming in greener after the winter cold. It wasn't very warm outside right now, either, and Beckett mentioned that Camille had gone inside. He was done with talking about his lost family, and I didn't blame him.

She had returned to the study and was already at work, chugging away at something. She was thorough, if nothing else. Well, she was also diligent, I supposed, and Beckett was always complimenting how she was able to consider issues in multiple ways, which was probably very helpful as a lawyer. Yes, I could see that he was right, and she was a good attorney. Boy, she was dumb about other stuff, though.

"I need to get going," she told us after another hour or so. "My fiancé is expecting me at our apartment." She made a little face of disgust, or maybe disapproval.

"You don't want to see him?" I asked.

"No, it's not that. I'm just being silly." Now she seemed embarrassed. "His mother came to stay for a while and it's a little…cramped, I guess. She has the bedroom and Dax has the couch."

"Where are you sleeping, then?" I questioned further.

"It's the floor for me, but that's ok. I think it's really good for my back. I don't have problems with it now, but I could as I get older," she explained, and both Beckett and I stared at her. I tried to imagine how my sisters' boyfriends or husbands would have reacted if our mom moved in with them for any length of time. I had to think that they wouldn't have slept on the floor, although actually, I could have seen my mom expecting them to do exactly that.

Beckett looked slightly pained, himself. "She isn't amenable to a hotel?"

"It would be a lot to make his mom stay in a hotel for six weeks." She sighed, and added, "But it's a lot for me to sleep on the floor, too. I'll talk to Dax about it."

Our boss walked her out to her car while I organized the various work materials we'd left in the study. We hadn't finished everything, but I was pretty sure that Beckett would keep going when I had left because that was his motto, after all. Work, work, work. But when he came back in, he just looked tired. He took his former place on the couch and watched as I organized.

"No need for a blanket," he told me, and I smiled.

"That was really hard to find and on my way back from the guest wing, I got lost. I should have tied a string on this doorknob to guide me."

"This is a big house for one person," he agreed. "Have a seat."

It was a big house for thirty people, but I only nodded as I joined him on the couch. My family of nine had lived in a place that was (maybe, and at best) a sixth of the size of this one, and we'd been ok. A little cramped at times, and Sophie had always talked about some guy who'd experimented with putting too many rats in a cage to make them fight. You'd have needed millions of rats to get that to happen here.

"How is your apartment?" he asked, and I told him about moving out and then in with my sister, into her studio. Millions of her studio would have fit in here, too, along with the rats.

"This situation won't last," I admitted. "Brenna and I don't get along too well. Of course I love her, but she doesn't get along with anyone, not even our older sister Addie. And Addie could make friends with a rock or a rattlesnake."

"Brenna isn't friendly, whereas you are."

He'd said those words with nothing to indicate that he was being sarcastic, not even lifting his eyebrow, but I turned my head to stare at him. "What do you mean?" I demanded.

"On my first day at the company, who were the two people that occupied the offices on either side of yours?"

"What? Like, their names?" I questioned, and he nodded. "Why are you asking that?"

"I'm asking because I'm aware that you have no idea of the answer. They were Adam and Kat," he told me, and I did remember them. Kind of. Anyway, both of them were gone now, so what did it matter?

"We weren't friends," I said. "I've told you that before. I wasn't close to anyone in our department. People came and went very fast."

"You partied together at a happy hour every Thursday," he reminded me. "You went out for appetizers on a weekly basis, too, and I'm sure there were many other occasions on which everyone gathered to avoid work."

So he had learned about the Korean barbecue restaurant we'd patronized on Tuesdays. At least he didn't know about Weed Wednesday, when Annis had invited a crowd over to her house for…well, the name was self-explanatory. I hadn't attended many of those gatherings.

"We went out a lot, but those people were only slight acquaintances," I again tried to explain. I was selective about my friendships, which wasn't a crime. "It was like in high school, how you could do a group project with other students in a class but you'd never sit with them at lunch or see them at parties. They were fine, but…" But he was just staring at me, and I knew that statement had sounded bad. "I was really invested in being popular in high school," I said, to clarify. "It meant a lot to me that I was with the right group of people. Weren't you like that?"

"No."

"Really?" I asked skeptically. It was hard to believe that someone as good looking as Beckett wouldn't have been destined for teenage greatness. He'd said that he played sports, and clearly, he'd had money for the right clothes, the right haircut, and the right car. Where had he gone wrong if he hadn't succeeded in reaching the high school social apex? "Were you a failure with girls?" I wondered.

"I went to an all-boys school and my entire focus was my GPA and choosing the right extracurriculars so that I would be accepted into the college I wanted. Popularity didn't enter my mind and I wasn't distracted by dating drama, either."

"Did you have friends?" I asked curiously.

The fact that he hesitated and needed to think about the answer told me more than his subsequent words did. "I was satisfied with my social life," he announced.

"That's good," I responded, although I didn't believe him in the least.

"Were you satisfied? You've already said that, despite your grand success back then, you didn't enjoy that period."

"No, I was never satisfied with my social status," I said. "All that stuff felt like swimming the mile, but the last lap just kept getting longer, somehow. Like, the wall was right there in front of me, but I was always reaching for it without finishing. I guess a land-based analogy would be climbing a mountain but the dirt kept skidding away beneath my feet, so I never could get to the summit. It made me anxious all the time." I felt that same pressure over my lungs right now, in fact, and it was due to the memory of those days and not to my debts or the possibility that I was, currently, being stalked by criminals.

"Why did you continue the climb? It sounds like an exhausting waste of time and energy."

"Well, it was," I agreed. "I never stopped to think about it, I just kept going. That's also how you swim the mile, by the way. If you consider what you're doing, you'll quit. I'm not a quitter and I don't run away from things." However much I'd wanted to, I never had. "Popularity was something else I had to win. I mean, my sisters were all…special. Nicola was so accomplished, Sophie was so smart. Everyone loved Addie and she didn't even have to try, they just did. Even as a kid, Brenna was stylish and artistic."

"I thought you had another sister. And what about your brother?"

"Grace was younger and she never cared. That's her superpower," I answered. "She doesn't give one, single crap about anything. Patrick was always the king of our house. It sure wasn't my dad or Nicola, the oldest. My brother never did anything wrong, not according to our mom. Of course, I understand that," I continued quickly. "She'd wanted a son for so long and she was so happy to have him. There I was tagging along, the add-on that no one really…" I paused. "It was a long time ago, but I get what you're saying about me."

"Really? What am I saying?"

"That I was a mean girl. That I still am."

"I'm not very interested in that," he said dismissively. "I need everyone on my team to be mature in their relationships with their coworkers. I certainly don't care if you're friends with them, but I do expect you to know their names."

I kept my temper under control. "When everyone was quitting due to your jacked-up expectations, I did realize how weird it was that I didn't really know them. I was watching them walk out and wondering who they were, and I've worked on that since. I know that Camille's middle name is Ursula, for example. That was her grandmother's name and she's thinking about using it for her baby."

Beckett paused, then said, "She told me tonight that her fiancé's surname is Miststuck. It's unusual, isn't it?"

"Yes." I thought. "Oh. If she changes her name when they get married, her initials could be C, U…"

"She won't," he said briskly. "She's far too intelligent. Did you also just say that Camille is pregnant?"

"She was talking about a future baby," I corrected myself. "Are you even allowed to ask that? Isn't there a law that prevents employers from hounding pregnant women?"

"I wouldn't hound her, but it would make a difference for us if she left right now." He put his hand over his own stomach and frowned.

"Are you still trying to prove yourself, like with your pyramid scheme?" I asked. "You're currently working for your extremely successful cousin, Steven. Are you trying to show him that you're also good enough to be there, and that you deserve recognition on your own merits?"

"Did you take an introduction to psychology class for your physical education major in college?" he asked.

"I'm not trying to analyze you, but it's very obvious."

"It's obvious to me that you and Annis were still playing high school games in the office, as was Gigi. Don't do that anymore."

"Sure." I stood up, my face burning. "No more childish behavior in the office. I assume that means you'll stop throwing eclairs at us on Mondays like we're monkeys in a zoo. No one was fooled into thinking that you cared about our wellbeing because you bought two hundred dollars' worth of baked goods. See you."

I almost thought I heard him answer, but I was moving too quickly. I went out to my car and drove right to the gate. I waited there, seething, for it to open.

It did not. I backed up, pulled forward, and then repeated that process twice more as I tried to find the sensor that would trigger it. Camille had been able to escape, so why couldn't I? Furious now, I reversed all the way back to the "house" and pounded on the front door.

Beckett opened it and eyed me. "Yes?"

"Your gate is broken," I informed him. "I'm trapped in here."

"Trapped," he commented, nodding as if the fact that I was unable to leave was somehow interesting and not absolutely maddening.

"Can you fix it?" I asked, maintaining my calm. Or maybe not, because my face felt hot in a way that told me it was flaming with color.

"Probably. Come in," he invited, and walked off into the gloom toward his kitchen. I followed, in a more stompy kind of way.

"Well?" I asked, as he went to the fridge. It was the same old one as before; he hadn't upgraded. "Are you going to release me?"

"This isn't a prison."

"I need to leave and I can't, so for me, yes," I answered. "Yes, it is a prison that I want to get out of."

"Would you like a beer?" he offered, and I eyed him.

"Is that a trap to get me to drink alcohol so that you can remark later on my lack of self-control?"

"No, it was me trying to conciliate."

"Well, that's a good first step, but you also need to stop insulting me," I informed him.

"I'm your superior. I'm allowed to moderate how people on my team treat each other," he said, and handed me a bottle.

"I haven't treated anyone badly. As much as you're always trying to protect Camille from big, ugly, mean Juliet, I haven't done anything but act cordial to that woman. I get that you like her—"

"Are you back to that?" he interrupted. "We have a working relationship."

I hadn't participated in the office pool with predictions about when they would get together, but I did believe that they would. I only shrugged and said, "It's none of my business. In the same way, it's none of your business if I took a psych class, or if—hey. Hey! What's the matter?"

"Nothing," he told me, but he'd lost all the color in his face, and then he left the kitchen. I put down the unopened bottle and followed as he walked into the hallway, swaying a little as he went into a room and closed the door behind himself. He hadn't been drinking, at least not while I was here before, and I hadn't been fuming at the broken gate for very long. Had he taken something? I stood in front of the door that I knew led to a bathroom, and I heard…ugh, that was vomit. I put my hand over my mouth and then removed it to place both my palms securely over my ears, but what was heard could not have been unheard. My own stomach roiled and I also got the idea that he wouldn't have enjoyed an audience while he upchucked. I went back to the kitchen and drank out of the faucet.

Beckett joined me in a moment. "Excuse me," he said. "I think something was wrong with that dinner."

"Oh." I looked toward the garbage, where I'd thrown away the paper containers. "In that case, it will be Camille next." The two of them had eaten salads and pasta with vegetables (no oil, no salt) but I'd had a burger, fully cooked, and no plant matter besides french fries and ketchup. I was probably in the clear, although I might have puked just from thinking about him in that bathroom. Bodily fluids were my weakness.

"I'm sure she's fine," he said gruffly, and got himself a glass of water. He was still totally pale and obviously still felt terrible. I also felt bad, that I'd been arguing with him when he had food poisoning.

"I'm sorry I said that about the eclairs. You know, that remark I made earlier about how you were buying us sugary treats in a failing effort to win us over. And I'm sorry that I implied that you don't know how to make friends, and that was why you were a loser in high school."

"What? I was not a loser," he told me and he did get some color back in his face, a good thing except that it was from anger. "I was perfectly satisfied with my social life."

"So you told me."

"And when did you imply that I didn't know how to make friends?" he asked, and yeah…maybe I had only been thinking it.

"I'm just sorry," I reiterated. "Let's leave it at that. Are you feeling ok?"

"I'm fine."

"And?" I prompted.

"I'm sorry that you felt the need to leave in a huff," he answered.

I waited, just like my big sister Nicola had done sometimes when she was trying to get us to confess. I looked at him, folded my arms, and waited.

"I have no idea why you're staring at me."

Well, it had worked better when Nicola had done it. "I think you should apologize for more than that," I informed him. "You led me into talking about ancient high school history so that you could turn it around and say that I'm still the same woman today. Which I'm not."

"No?"

"No," I said, so hot and angry all over again that I could have easily jumped into Lake St. Clair and not bothered about the water temperature at all. "I'm leaving, and if that gate doesn't open, then I'm driving right through it."

"That would destroy your new car."

"The new car that you forced me to get!" I challenged, but then waved my hands. "I take that back. I needed it and I'm glad I have it. But so help me, I will destroy it and I'll take your gate down, too."

I definitely heard his remark when I left for the second time: "I thought you said that I was nice," he murmured, but I was already gone. This time, the gate swung easily and as if there had never been anything wrong at all.

I drove to my new residence of Brenna's studio, and I thought a lot as I went. I had never been very introspective, and no, I hadn't ever taken any psych classes, intro or otherwise. But all that stuff he'd said about mean girls and knowing people's names…and yes, I was also aware that besides my confusion about their identities, I also hadn't acted all that friendly with my coworkers. But I'd been making an effort with the new ones, hadn't I? I hadn't told Camille that I thought she was a pushover and that my fiancé would have been the one sleeping on the floor, not me. Better yet, he would have been sleeping in another house altogether if he thought it was appropriate for his mother to bunk with us for six weeks.

But then I also thought about friendships. Gigi and Annis had been as thick as thieves (literally) but I'd never clicked too much with either of them. Other people in the department had also been close. There were two women (I was pretty sure that their names were Michelle and Freya, but it could have been Saoirse and Alice) who had been best friends, and they'd quit together. Anyway…

Anyway, where did that leave me? I was in a crud car and driving to an apartment that wasn't my own, I was still up to my eyeballs in debt—although yes, it was now better. I was the person who was still afraid to look at my phone, and who had been (kind of unknowingly, but mostly knowingly) complicit in criminal activity.

I was the person who was alone. I was also the person thinking about myself when I'd just left someone who was my boss, but also a little bit of a friend, sick and probably lonely in that dark, sad "house."

Sugar.

At the next red light, I got out my phone but I didn't look at any of the other texts that I had received. "Are you feeling ok?" I wrote to Beckett.

"I'm all right," he answered. "How are you?"

"Kind of mad still. Driving home."

"Let me know when you get there," he ordered. It was presumptuous, but that was ok. I decided that I would.