Chapter 10

M om shook her head. "Do I really have to explain, JuJu? You know why!" she scolded in answer to my question about why I had to go shopping. "If we're trying to get Sophie and Danny together, then we have to unite as a family. Everyone has to pitch in and redo her, and your part is clothes."

"Mom, she hasn't asked for our help," Addie gently reminded her. "I think she likes herself, exactly how she is."

"Well, now she has nothing to wear. I threw away almost everything she brought over here," our mother announced, and Addie winced.

"Without asking?Mom…"

"She's the parent," I reminded my sister. "She's also the one doing all the laundry. If Mom thought that Sophie's clothes were too disgusting to be worn, then she had the right to toss them."

"Sophie's clothes were here in the laundry pile because she's taking care of our niece. Otherwise, she'd be washing them herself at her own house, and she doesn't care about anyone's opinions except Daniel's. He also likes her the way she is," my other sister added, and we all turned to stare at Grace. You never knew when she was listening or what she was absorbing, and you never knew what was going to come out of her mouth. That had sounded close to the truth.

"Well, the clothes are long gone now, and I told her that you'd go shopping with her, Juliet," Mom went on. "You can help her pick things that are more…not what she's been wearing."

I nodded. At the baby shower, Sophie had dressed in old garage coveralls, complete with random stains. "Is she really getting together with Danny?"

"He goes by Daniel, now," Addie corrected, but she was grinning with delight. "I think they are going to be a thing. Her voice gets funny when she talks about him and you know how he always loved her." She tucked some hair behind her ear so that the baby couldn't tug on it, and the sunlight made her emerald engagement ring glow like it was lit from within. "Grace, do you want to hold Esme?"

"I will," I stated, and I took the baby from my sister's arms. "Hi," I said, and she looked back at me solemnly.

"You guys are exactly alike. Esme, this is how you'll look when you're a big girl," Addie said, and the baby smiled at my sister.

"She looks like Patrick," my mom corrected, and immediately got a very worried expression that made me and my older sister exchange glances, too.

"What's going on with him?" Addie casually wondered, and to my surprise, Grace answered.

"He's high all the time," she said, and Mom turned on her, furious.

"He is not! He only smokes a little bit and only when he's with his old friends because they're terrible. You know, JuJu, that they've always been a bad influence on him. Remember how Liv used to hate them?" Her face looked sad, as it usually did when she thought about Patrick's former fiancée. Liv was married to someone else now, and despite reminding myself that I should give Mom lots of grace because she'd lost someone whom she considered to be another daughter…

I got mad. I got very mad, because Patrick had cheated on Liv and after that, he'd screwed around even more until he had totally screwed himself. Esme made a funny noise, like a little squeak, and I looked down at her. And then he'd left his baby, and thank goodness for Sophie.

"I'll go shopping," I announced. "But only if Sophie wants to, not if you're making her."

"When have I ever been able to make her do anything?" my mom asked, and no one needed to answer that, but "when pigs could fly" or "when Grace remembered her wallet" came to my mind.

The baby made some more noises, calling my attention back to her, and I smiled. She was so sweet, and she really was beautiful. Her eyes were almost turquoise, just like my brother's. And mine, so yes, we did look alike. I played with her for a while before I had to hand her back over to Sophie, who'd shown up again (my mom had said that she never stayed away for too long). I could already see some changes in my sister. For one thing, her hair was clean. It was such a beautiful color, almost mahogany, but it didn't look too good when it was dirty. She'd also made some adjustments to her clothes, but…

"Are you wearing Patrick's shirt? And his pants?" I asked her.

She hitched up the waist. "Yes, because Mom threw out my stuff." Surprisingly, she didn't seem too angry about that.

"She was saying that you and I should go shopping together." I waited for my sister to shoot that idea right down but even more surprisingly, she was now nodding at me.

"I bought a few things online but I need more to wear. You shop the most out of all of us," she noted, and I knew what that meant. I'd spent way, way too much and had gotten myself into huge trouble, which she knew about (partially). I still owed her four hundred dollars, in fact, and I saw her name every time I looked at the debt list I kept on my phone.

"Brenna thinks her taste is better," I mentioned, and maybe I was fishing for a compliment.

As usual, Sophie didn't rise to that bait. "Well, she's probably right, but can you imagine me shopping with her? We'd probably get arrested for fighting."

"We're too old for that," I said and I sighed. I was feeling every day of my twenty-five (almost twenty-six) years. Since I wasn't doing the deliveries and since I hated to be at Brenna's studio, I had picked up more hours at the restaurant where I'd previously only worked on weekends. I left Whitaker Enterprises and drove there, and then I got home late. Because I had to leave my real job earlier than usual to make the waitress shifts, I had to start earlier, too. It was a demanding schedule, but the good thing was that the new car was very reliable and got me everywhere I needed to go, even though I was traveling in a non-luxurious and ugly manner. I was making money, not as much as I had when I'd been delivering whatever those envelopes had held, but at least this was legal (taxable, too, which was unfortunate). Being so busy also gave me less time to sit and stew in my anxiety.

It was quieter at the office in the early, early morning, with only the security guards in the lobby and a few stragglers riding the elevators. One other person was always there, though: Beckett. I had started to wonder if he had moved into the building. He wasn't rooted in his chair, because he left fairly frequently for meetings and I knew that he also went to the gym almost every day. Afterwards, he supposedly returned alone to that big "house," but I'd heard rumors.

"I think they left together," Rashelle had said in the lunchroom. She was one of the new paralegals, but she fit right in with the gossip crowd. "I saw them going to the same floor in the garage, which is not where she parks."

I didn't park on Beckett's floor, either, and I'd been thinking back to a few months before when he'd scared me to death with his sudden presence as I'd walked to my car. Had he been waiting there just to talk to me? Then, after determining that it was a bad idea to freak out a woman alone in a parking garage, he'd escorted me the rest of the way and had waited as I'd driven off.

"What do you think, Juliet? Has Camille told you anything about that ‘fiancé' she's supposed to have? There's no ring," Rashelle had pointed out, but I'd only finished making my XL cup of coffee and shrugged. Nope, I had no intel, but I really hoped that my colleagues were wrong about my two "superiors." It would have meant one or both of them was going to leave the firm, and what would that have meant for the rest of us and our workload? That was my primary concern.

On the Monday after I made the shopping plans with Sophie, I went into work at my now-usual time of way too early and of course, Beckett was already at his desk. He'd swiveled his chair, though, so that he was looking at the windows, and I didn't see his face until he sent me a message to come to his office, and he turned to watch me enter.

"Why are you here right now?"

"Good morning," I answered, and settled in the chair across from him with my notebook open and a new page already dated. "Nice to talk to you, too."

"Hello," he said. "Why have you been coming in so early?"

"Am I doing something wrong? Am I not completing tasks, not doing my job?" I waited, knowing the answers already. He had nothing to complain about and was only being a busybody.

Beckett, of course, would not admit to his busy body-ness. He frowned a little instead of responding to my very rational questions. "You look tired," he told me.

"So do you." Both of our statements were true. I was exhausted due to the schedule I was pulling and due to the dreams I was having when I finally crawled onto Brenna's couch. They were the same old nightmares, but now they had the added element of firearms: someone chasing me with a gun, someone aiming a gun at my chest, someone firing a gun next to my ear so that my eyes flew open and I was sure that I'd actually heard that sound echoing in the grey dimness of the city night.

Beckett also looked tired and I thought that his face looked a little different—not less handsome, but thinner. "Are you trying to lose weight?" I asked. "You don't need to."

"That's not your concern."

"You were just the one saying that I looked bad. That's not your concern, either, despite the thousands of times that you've told me that everything is your business because you're my superior."

"I have not said that even once, let alone thousands of times, but I am your sup—"

"Let's make a deal that you won't use the word anymore," I suggested. "No more ‘superior.' I'd prefer boss. And now, why did you want me to come in? Was it only to insult my looks?"

"I wasn't insulting you. I was…" He hesitated. "I was concerned. I think you look…"

More hesitation, but this time he didn't continue. "Stunning?" I suggested. "Breathtaking?"

"Fine," he said finally. "You look fine. And I, apparently, look too thin."

"We're a handsome couple," I said and then kind of froze. "That was a joke. I wasn't implying anything." I thought about the betting pool speculating on the date of his impending hookup with Camille, and I relaxed. No one thought that Beckett and I would end up together, not anyone we worked with and certainly not the man himself. "I don't need to explain that to you," I said, smiling. "You know it wouldn't happen."

"It would be inappropriate to enter into a relationship with someone I supervise—why are you raising your eyebrow at me?"

"Was I?"

"You were," he confirmed. "I know about the betting pool."

"How could you—sugar! Are you paying off the security guards again? Are they in on it, too?"

"Yes, and yes." He squinted at me. "Why did I call you in here?"

"I think you missed me over the weekend," I suggested. "What did you do?"

"I worked. And you?"

"Also worked," I answered. "I saw my mom, my niece, and a few of my sisters yesterday, too."

He wasn't as interested in that as he was in the first part of what I'd told him. "Is that why you look so tired? Are you still waitressing, even without that obscene car payment?"

I hesitated as well. "I need to have a second job," I explained. "I have some debt that I'm trying to clear."

"I had assumed that your remarkable swimming career paid for your college degree."

"It did!" I flared up angrily because I didn't appreciate the sarcasm. "Look at this." I walked around to his side of the desk and moved the keyboard so that I could reach it.

He immediately closed everything with the mouse and rolled his chair away from me. "Juliet, what are you doing?"

"Watch," I told him, and opened a new window to show a video of the swimming championships in Indianapolis from a few years before. "That's me in lane one, wearing the purple cap. This is the hundred-yard butterfly."

The whole thing was over in about fifty seconds, and he watched every one of them. Then he removed my hand from the mouse and replayed it, bending forward a little to scrutinize the swimmers as we flew through the water. I hardly remembered the race and I hadn't watched it since, so it was odd to see it now. It seemed like it was another woman and not Juliet Curran in that pool. I wasn't the same person anymore.

"I didn't win, obviously. I came in sixth, but that was the A final," I said. "So, out of all the women in the United States, there were only five who could swim faster than I did on that day."

"Besides all the women who weren't in college at the time of this race, you mean."

"Bye," I said, and walked out. Yes, of course he was right. There were lots of women who were better swimmers, and in the end, what did that matter? I wasn't a professional butterflyer today. I was sleeping on my younger sister's couch and schlepping overpriced wine bottles at night while watching over my shoulder for someone trying to shoot me. What did some swim meet so many years ago mean now? Nothing. I rattled my own mouse and ignored how much his comment had hurt my feelings—but that was what I got for trying to show off. That was what I got for trying to prove that ancient history still mattered, that I was still a success, that I had been someone important and not just an idiot who'd ruined her life.

"Juliet." Beckett stood in my doorway.

"I'm working," I told my boss, which was extremely rude. "I mean, can I help you?"

"I wasn't trying to insult you. I was just trying to be accurate."

"Call it what you will," I answered, and looked at my screen. For some reason, it was blurry and I blinked a lot and then wiped across the glass with my sleeve, which solved the problem.

"It was meant to be accurate but it was extremely rude," he continued. "I was shocked to see that video."

"What?" I did look at him. "Why?"

"You'd said that you were good and your résumé indicated prowess, but I didn't understand until I saw for myself. You were the one of the best in the country."

"Except for all the women who weren't in college that day, sure. It doesn't matter, anyway, it's nothing. Nobody cares about the sixth best hundred flyer from years ago and it doesn't make any difference to me now."

"If I were that good at something, I would probably paint it on the side of my car. I might erect a billboard at my house."

I stared. "What?" I asked again.

"I can't imagine having that kind of talent," he answered. "You should be very proud."

"No, it's nothing," I repeated to him. "And you do have that kind of talent. You made partner so young and you graduated at the top of your undergrad and law school classes. You were the president of that law school magazine, the review or whatever it was, and you clerked with—"

"How do you know all that?"

"It's on this thing called the internet. I looked you up, the same as you could have done about me. I also looked up Camille, and you're right, she's very accomplished as well." They would be good together, I decided, when she ditched the stupid guy who made her sleep on the floor and when Beckett ditched some of his scruples about being a boss and her "superior."

"I'm disbanding that betting pool today," he started to tell me, but I shook my head.

"The more you call attention to it, the more everyone will talk. If it wasn't about you and Camille, it would be someone else because that's just how offices work. Ignore it," I suggested. "She'll marry her fiancé and everyone will move to a new topic." I checked to see if he got upset by my reference to his competition, but he didn't seem to care.

He only nodded. "I hope you're not angry about what I said. I was very surprised, that was all. You had repeatedly told me that you were good, but I didn't understand."

"I didn't ‘repeatedly' tell you that," I corrected, and I refrained from suggesting again that he could use a little tool called a "search engine" to find out more about people, if he was curious. That was how I'd seen a picture of his beautiful mom and his handsome father. I'd also seen a picture of his little brother, a towhead who looked just like a very small Beckett, and that had been heartbreaking.

He left, eventually, but he did return around lunchtime at a point that I was starting to yawn and think about finding some chips. He didn't bother to knock, but he swung open my door. "I have a sandwich for you," he announced.

"Does it say ‘sorry' in mustard on the bread? You don't have to buy me lunch."

"Come to my office," he ordered.

Fine, I would come for a free sandwich. "I hope you asked for mayo," I mentioned, and he pointed to several small packets.

"You can add your own," he told me, and also indicated the sandwich that belonged to me. "I requested it on the side because I think that deli has a heavy hand with condiments."

"How would you know? You only eat things that are bare." In fact, I could see that right now, his "condiment" was a piece of lettuce.

"I also got these." Beckett slid out two more items from the brown bag and I stared.

"A cookie? Potato chips? I guess you do feel bad about what you said. I really don't care," I told him, although I had cared a lot. It was just dumb to feel that way, to be upset that he had said something true.

"If someone belittled my accomplishments, I would care. I would want more than a cookie as an apology."

"Maybe I'm a bigger person than you are," I said. "I'm bigger than a cookie." I picked it up and it did look good.

"No," he told me, and removed it from my hand. "Eat the sandwich first." I noticed that he moved the mayonnaise packets out of my reach, too.

"Is this about something else?" I asked. "Are you showing the rest of the office that you don't have a favorite employee?"

"The situation with Camille does concern me. I'm afraid that the staff will treat her differently, less respectfully, if they truly believe that we're having an affair. It undermines her position in this office if her colleagues think that she's involved in a sexual relationship with her boss, perhaps that she got her job because she slept with me. It demeans her. When you looked her up, could you see that she received academic scholarships to pay her way through school? Did you read about her background? She attended a high school with a very low graduation rate and she's the first person in her family to go to college, let alone to receive a postgraduate degree."

"People aren't talking in that way to demean her. It's just that you two work so closely and you're both…you know."

"Attorneys?"

"Attractive," I corrected. "In terms of looks, you go well together. In terms of intelligence, in terms of drive and dedication, in terms of level of achievement, in terms of everything." Holy Mary, I'd probably just convinced him to date her.

He seemed stunned. "I'm not interested," he stated. "Neither is she. She's engaged to someone else."

"And you're already married to your career." I retrieved the little mayo packets, emptied them onto the turkey, and wished for more. I, too, had a heavy hand with condiments.

"I should say thank you," he added. "What you just said was quite complimentary."

"You should," I agreed, and then snuck a look at him over the crust of the bread. "You didn't really have to buy me lunch. I'm not mad."

"But I hurt your feelings and that was obvious to me even as I spoke. It was the same way that I hurt your feelings when you thought that I helped you with your automotive issue because you were incapable of doing it on your own."

"I'm grateful for that." And he'd been right about it, too: I was an idiot who couldn't solve my own problem. "All that other stuff doesn't matter now. You thought I was dumb when I talked about wanting to go back in time, and I was. I'm not the successful athlete who swam in the A final or the girl who was the queen bee of the senior class in high school. I'm just Juliet, that's all." I was a woman in a hole who was crawling her way out, and maybe someday, I'd get there. Right now, it was still a little hard to see the sunlight above me.

"None of the things that I've done matter much, either," he said. "No one at the bank cares that I was president of the law review when we're negotiating. No one in the planning department is impressed that I was the valedictorian when I'm trying to get a variance. It's just me, Beckett, and the past isn't important."

"But you wouldn't be where you are today without all the amazing things you've already accomplished in your life. It's like how you keep driving it into me how Camille is so special and amazing. That's why you hired her and why you're so enamored of her, too."

"I'm not. I'm not enamored."

"Anyway, it doesn't matter. I appreciate a free lunch, though, and especially the cookie part." I took a big bite. "Free is my favorite thing."

"Why do you have that second job? If it's not due to student loans, why do you need money?"

The cookie felt very dry in my mouth and stuck hard in my throat, and I went to get a glass of water in the lunchroom. I drank and felt better, and that had also given me a little time to think. There was not going to be a way to get him off this topic, and telling him the whole truth would obliterate any microscopic feelings of respect that he had developed toward me. I decided to share a little, a few crumbs rather than the whole humiliating saga.

"I have a second job because spent unwisely," I told him after I returned to my seat. "You saw how I'd gotten myself into a mess with my car. I did that with other things, too, and now I'm paying the piper." Since the last mistake that Beckett had made was when he was sixteen and got scammed, he wouldn't understand how an adult could be so stupid, and I wouldn't be able to explain my way out of it even if I'd wanted to. So I moved on. "Did you look at the problems with the Roscommon leases?"

The rest of our lunch conversation was work-related, which relieved me a lot. I didn't have a shift at the restaurant that night, either, which was another relief. Despite a great reluctance, I made myself go to the gym instead. Beckett was still in his office when I left but I heard rushing feet coming down the hall behind me as I went toward the elevators.

"Wait! Juliet, I'll go with you," Camille said. She was smiling broadly. "We could work out together."

I shifted the bag of my gym clothes to the other shoulder. "Um, yeah. Ok." I'd been thinking about what our boss had said, how demeaning it was for her to be thought of as only girlfriend/sex material, rather than the competent employee that she really was. I'd seen her in action myself and no matter what I thought about her dumb fiancé or her lack of city-living skills, I knew that she was a good lawyer and an asset to our department. I hadn't been participating in the rumors, but I figured that it wouldn't hurt me to start quashing them.

And it wouldn't have hurt me to be more friendly with her either, especially when she seemed to want that so much. She'd noticed how I was into junk food and every time she went out during the workday, she always brought something back for me, like a bag of something greasy or a bar of something sweet.

It was nice. And I hadn't been acting that way in return.

"Yeah, we should definitely work out together," I agreed, and her smile got even bigger. I'd heard her in calls where she was very tough, very direct—but this side of her was more like my sister Addie. Addie was always encouraging us to be nicer, saying that it wouldn't hurt anybody, and I decided that she was right. I could be nicer to this girl who was new to Detroit and was engaged to a guy who (I thought) was a punk and treated her poorly. She needed an ally.

"Is your future mother-in-law still sleeping in your bedroom?" I asked as we stepped into the elevator, and she was pretty excited to tell me about that situation. Her fiancé's mom had actually moved into a long-term rental, but the woman wasn't happy about it, not at all, and Dax (the boyfriend) was blaming Camille for the bad feelings.

The story continued as we went into the locker room. "What would you do in my situation?" she asked.

"Me? I have no idea. I have pretty much zero experience with mother-in-law type people," I explained. "I've had boyfriends but they've never lasted long enough for me to be very involved in their families." I realized that she was looking sympathetic so I added, "That was all my choice. If they were getting too serious, I broke up with them. I don't want that."

"Really? I've had my wedding planned since I was about twelve."

"So have a few of my sisters. Brenna has every single detail worked out, including the varieties of wine that will be served. Including the number of karats in her future ring," I said. I wasn't sure if it was actually a wedding that she was after, though, or if it was just another chance for her to demonstrate her superior taste. "She wants everything just like she wants it and she thinks that she can make things prettier and classier than the rest of the world can. She's kind of right about that," I had to admit. "She just has to find a guy and force him into her plan, and into whatever clothes she picks out for him. She says that my wardrobe hurts her eyes."

"What? No, you dress so well," Camille assured me, which felt good. Maybe the credit card debt had been worth…no, it hadn't.

We went out into the very well-appointed gym, still talking about my sisters (one of my favorite topics) but I did ask more questions about her fiancé, too. "Why don't you wear a ring?" I wondered. "Are you as particular as Brenna?"

"No, not at all," she answered, but she was acting the same way that my mom did when she wanted to pretend like she didn't care about something. Camille shrugged, jerking her shoulders, and she shook her head at the same time, and frowned, and waved her index finger. It was just too much protesting. Either she really was that picky, or something else was going on.

It was something else, but it took about an hour, after we'd finished doing weights and were on the treadmills, before she admitted it to me. "So, about my engagement ring…" she started to explain, and did the over-gesturing thing again. She threw up her hands, waggled her eyebrows, shook her head, stuck out her tongue, and smiled. "It's really not a big deal to me. I never felt like I had to have an expensive piece of jewelry to prove that Dax and I are a strong, loving couple."

"No, you don't have to," I agreed. My oldest sister had a very plain ring, but I didn't doubt that she and her husband loved each other more than anything. Addie's giant emerald didn't mean that she and Granger were any more serious or stable, but it was very nice and I mentioned that. "You certainly don't have to have expensive jewelry, but I wouldn't mind seeing something pretty on my finger every day. How did he ask you to marry him if he didn't do it with a ring?"

"That's a funny story," she told me, smiling again, but it didn't sound funny. She'd been ready to take a job in Los Angeles but Dax hadn't wanted her to, since he'd found new employment here in Michigan. "He said, ‘If I have to marry you to get your ass to Detroit, I guess I will.' So now we're engaged," she told me.

Holy Mary, the romance of it. "That's different from how it happened with my two sisters," I mentioned, and she wanted to hear their engagement stories. She was an only child, and the fact that I had so many siblings seemed to fascinate her. I tried to emphasize how much we fought and how hard it was, sometimes, to have all those eyes on me. They saw every failure, every misstep. I was sure that Addie was looking at me with sympathy and regret, now that her dumb fiancé had snooped into my financial problems. I'd told Sophie about some of those directly, and she obviously thought I was stupid, just like she thought that I was unreliable and cold for not taking care of my niece.

Camille and I chatted in the same way as I had with friends in the past, although she was my boss; in fact, she didn't seem to care at all that she was my "superior." We walked to the garage together and when we got to where she'd parked, I saw a different car in her spot. This one was a lot like my old one, bigger and more expensive than what she usually drove. I was impressed and tried not to think about how it made my new car seem even worse.

"You upgraded," I mentioned, but she shook her head.

"No, this is Dax's," she explained. "He took mine because it's very reliable and he's been having issues with this one." She must have noticed my disapproval because she added, "He has to drive around a lot more than I do and when he leaves the clubs at night, it's really late. He needs a car that's running well and this one sure isn't. Beckett had to drive me home the other day because I couldn't get it started."

Oh. That was the source of one of the rumors I'd heard lately. "I'll wait while you try to start it now," I suggested, and as I'd feared, that didn't happen. No, she didn't need a jump, she told the security guard who drove up in a golf cart. It wasn't a battery problem.

"There's a good garage not too far from here," I mentioned, but she said no.

"Dax is going to deal with it," she assured me.

"In the meantime, I can drive you home," I told her. She'd done it for me once, too, and it wasn't like I was itching to get back to Brenna's couch.

"We're still looking for a new place," she explained when she gave me the address of her apartment building, and it wasn't somewhere I would have chosen to live, myself. We drove for a while and she watched all the homes we passed. "I would love to buy a house. Like that one," she said as she pointed. "Isn't it sweet?"

We made a left and approached her building. "What about something like Beckett's place?" I suggested, and we both laughed. "Isn't it crazy?"

"It's beautiful but it makes me worried I'm going to break something."

I nodded. I'd felt the same way at first.

"You know I've only been there when you're there too," she said and I nodded again, thinking that she must have gotten wind of some of the rumors. "I would never get together with my boss, even if I weren't engaged. There's a whole section about that in the handbook. The employee handbook for the company," she clarified.

"I read it…what's happening up here?" There were a bunch of police cars on the narrow street, blocking most of it.

"There's always something," she sighed, but then sat up straight as we eased to a stop. "Oh, I think someone's really hurt. There's a stretcher."

"They're not in a rush to move the person to an ambulance, though," I answered, which was a bad sign. They were slowly rolling the gurney along the side of the road.

An officer motioned to direct us and I started to move forward, creeping along toward a car that had smashed into a streetlight. The front was totally crushed and pieces littered the sidewalk and asphalt. "How fast were they going on this little street?" Camille asked. "People drive like maniacs!"

That car was familiar and I turned my head, gawking as we passed it. "That's…" I started to say, but I had to have been wrong. That wasn't the car that had parked next to me in the garage at the Whitaker building for a few years. No, it couldn't have been.

"Oh no, we have to go right by the victim," she whispered, and I slowed more in response to the officer's hand signals as we neared the gurney. A sheet covered the person lying on it, even the face. "She must have died in that crash. I wonder if she was wearing her seatbelt."

I turned and looked, too, following Camille's gaze to the shrouded body. One hand was visible, and I knew why she had identified the victim as a woman. I saw four beautiful nails on four long, elegant fingers but the thumb—

It was also long and thin, but the top knuckle was funny. That was big and round, making her digit look like a lollypop. I was sure then that I did know that person under the sheet, the one who'd just lost her life in a car accident.

"Juliet?" Camille asked. "Why are you stopping?"

I hadn't liked her but she was young and she'd been larger than life. And now she was dead?

"Juliet? Are you ok?"

No, not really. I was so sorry for Gigi, and also I had a suffocating feeling that this was only the beginning of something terrible.