Chapter 3

M y head throbbed but I nodded and tried to pay attention to the conversation instead of the pain. "That sounds great," I said, and my mom's friend Stephanie nodded back with gusto.

"It's amazing ," she corrected me, and went on to share more details about her amazing daughter, who was doing such amazing things. She had graduated with honors, had I known that? And then, due to all the internships she'd had during college and due to her amazing interview skills, she'd landed three job offers. In New York! That city was so perfect for a girl her age—my age, she noted. So much to do, so many interesting men. Had I ever thought about moving there? How about to Chicago? Boston? Los Angeles?

"I'm doing great here," I told her, and that was a lie so big that my nose should have grown. Just last night…

But this was a party, my mother's baby shower, so I smiled and put last night out of my mind.

"I can't believe how much money my daughter makes." My mom's friend covered her mouth and giggled. "It's not nice to talk about that, of course."

"Then maybe you shouldn't," I suggested, and maybe I'd said it with a little too much feeling because she stared at me.

"Are you unhappy in your own job, Juliet?" she asked.

She was probably only trying to be nice, I told myself. She was probably asking out of concern, and wasn't trying to collect dirt on me so that she could call her daughter and tell her how Juliet Curran's life in Detroit sucked. Still, I filled her in on a lot of details about my glamorous job, my glamorous clothes, and my glamorous friends. I swung my glamorous purse forward and pretended to look for something in it so that she could see how I wasn't exactly a pauper. I discussed my car—had I told her that I'd bought myself a new car? I went on for a while about the guys I was seeing and how much fun I had with them.

"Yes," she said, and her mouth pinched. "I remember you having a lot of fun in high school, too."

Nope, she wasn't trying to be nice. My eyebrow shot up and I stared down at her, which was easy since I was five-eleven even when I wasn't wearing heels. "What do you mean by that?" I asked, and waited. As I'd suspected, she didn't want to answer my question. "I need to help my sister," I said, and I walked quickly away. My phone rattled and I checked it…not again. How was that even possible?

I shoved open the door to the kitchen and one of my sisters really was in there. Sophie was replenishing a tray and looked none too happy herself.

"What's wrong? What are you doing?" she asked me. "What are you up to?"

"Nothing! Sugar, Sophie, leave me alone." I needed to stop thinking about this. I threw open the fridge, grabbed one of my dad's bottles of beer, and chugged it.

Sophie stared. "What's wrong, JuJu?" she asked me again.

At that moment, after all these months, I couldn't seem to hold it in. Words spilled out of my mouth as I told her a little of what was going on. I said that I had too much debt, I was struggling to pay it off, and I was scared. The interest was just…I had to stop a few times and gasp in a breath, sucking it in past the weight on my chest.

But she seemed to already know, at least some of it. After all, her actual career was investigating people and she must have looked me up. She couldn't have been aware of everything, but she did understand that I was in trouble. "I need some money," I finally admitted, because that text I'd just received had sounded really, really threatening.

"How much?"

I gave her a number and her eyes got huge, and one of her eyebrows raised. Besides our dad, we were the only people in the family who could do that, but unlike him, it didn't only happen when we were very angry. Sophie just looked shocked. She would have been even more shocked if she'd known that I hadn't admitted the full amount, only part. "Don't tell," I said, and I had a feeling that she wouldn't. This wasn't like talking to Addie or Nicola, the sisters who loved me. Sophie didn't feel that way, but she wasn't a bad person. She just didn't like me, which I had accepted.

But then she started to slowly nod. "Ok," she said. "I can loan that to you."

"Seriously?" Now I was the one who was shocked. "I didn't think you had any money."

She did, apparently, and she wasn't too pleased that I was questioning her. It made her snippy enough that she didn't question me in return about how this had happened, how I had gotten myself into such a mess. That was lucky, because I really didn't want to explain to my smart sister how I'd been such a total idiot.

"Don't tell, Soph," I reminded her. "Promise?" I explained how Addie already knew part of the story and had offered to help, but I'd said no. We were both aware that if our oldest sister Nicola found out, she would have gone ballistic. Mom would have wanted to talk it through with all her friends, including the woman with the amazing daughter. Brenna would have laughed at me, Grace would have acted like she didn't understand, and my dad would have been so disappointed.

We figured out how I would pay her back, a little at a time, but even that was going to stretch my finances a lot. I nodded and said it was wonderful, great, perfect. Then she did have a final question. "Why is it ok to borrow from me but not Addie?" she asked.

"Addie will get invested," I explained. "She'll get all emotional and worried, but you won't. You don't care." Sophie seemed to be about to say something, but we just looked at each other for a moment before I thanked her again.

As much as I wanted to run out of this party, I couldn't. After all, I had been the one who'd convinced my sisters to help prep for it, doing all the decorations and making all the food, since my mom had gotten caught up in the games part of the day and had kind of forgotten the rest. I stayed, avoiding Sophie as much as I could, and also avoiding everyone else, too.

This weekend had been full of surprises, and one had been really good. My oldest sister, Nicola, had pulled me aside while we'd been cooking together the day before and given me giant news: she was having a baby. Like, Nic was pregnant, and I'd stared at her, hardly believing it.

"You are?" I'd asked, and she'd smiled, hugged me, then said she needed to go to the bathroom for a second. I had heard her retching and the sound of it almost made me puke, too, because I'd never been able to deal with bodily fluid stuff. When she'd emerged, she'd sworn me to secrecy.

"I just don't want to tell Mom quite yet, JuJu. Ok? You did such a good job keeping my wedding under wraps. Can you do that again?"

"Well…" It was hard to say no, when Nicola was looking so serious but also so happy. "Why?" I asked instead. "Don't you think she'd be able to help you? She had seven kids herself! I bet she'll have plenty to say about babies and pregnancy."

But my sister had rolled her eyes. "I know, which is why I don't want to tell her quite yet."

"You guys are so mean to Mom," I had protested. "She loves you so much, and you're always trying to exclude her."

"I'll tell her soon," Nicola answered. "I will, I promise. I've been pretty sick lately, and I can't take…" She'd stopped. "I'll tell her soon. Jude and I want to enjoy this together for a while first, ok?"

Our other sisters had already known, apparently; I had been the last to find out, and now Mom would have to wait even longer. Reluctantly, I'd promised Nicola that I wouldn't tell, even though I knew that it would break our mother's heart when she discovered that all her daughters had been keeping this monumental secret. It made me feel awful that I had to, and it also made me feel awful that even Grace had found out before I had.

Now I should have felt relief that Soph was helping me—I did, and I was grateful, too—but I also felt so humiliated and stupid. How had I been so dumb? And my smart sister knew it too, and I was already aware of what she thought about me…

The party never got any easier, but it did finally end. Unfortunately, the next day was Monday. That meant I had to work like a demon under the supervision of blue-grey eyes that didn't seem to miss much. The whole floor was different now with him watching, and he was also listening. Before, under Annis, there had been a lot of sound, even through the thick glass walls. People had chatted in the hallways and sat on each other's desks to talk and laugh. The printer had constantly hummed, too, because our former boss had loved to use it. I'd been able to hear Annis all the way down the hall as she made calls to her boyfriend and kids, yelling at them for various transgressions.

Now we were alone in our little offices, and we bent over our desks or stared at our monitors without uttering a word. All of us were afraid of losing our jobs and all of us had so much work to do. There was no time to gossip and chat. There was hardly even time for me to go to the bathroom, and I waited until I really, really had to pee and then ran and went as fast as I could before hurrying back to the endless tasks assigned to me.

The near-silence on our floor and my intense focus on my job were why I nearly fell out of my chair when the voice suddenly boomed from the office phone on my desk.

"Attention, Whitaker Enterprises legal department," it intoned. "Please come to the lunchroom. Immediately."

Beckett's voice had been so loud that a pen next to my phone had vibrated and through the glass, I saw several coworkers rubbing their ears. I stood, pretty reluctantly, and walked toward the lunchroom. We all did, silently and with our feet dragging, and our small group of Whitaker employees looked more like a funeral procession. We looked at each other as we went with unspoken questions on our lips. Why did he want us to meet in there? Was someone else going to get fired? Didn't he know that we had so much to accomplish that we couldn't just stop for a random break? Were we going to have to stay at our desks even later tonight because of this delay?

Our boss stood behind the round table in the middle of the lunchroom as we shuffled in, and we stared at him. Only the slight hum of the high-end coffee machine interrupted the total silence.

Then Beckett spoke. "Hello," he said, and a few people greeted him in return. "I know that the first day of the workweek is tough. It's hard to get back to the grind after the fun of two days off." He sounded as if he'd prepared this speech and was reciting it from memory, and I saw my colleagues glance at each other. "I brought in some snacks to help out. This Monday party will be a new tradition in our department."

We looked at the table where, yes, there were snacks arranged on a platter. Where had the food come from? I knew that he hadn't had it delivered because I hadn't seen a stranger pass by, and I also knew that Beckett hadn't taken the elevator down himself. I wasn't really watching for him, but it was hard to avoid movement outside my office. And maybe I had been watching him a little, but not too often.

I looked again at the platter and its contents did seem…sparse. I counted two cookies, a pair of brownies, and a single square of cake. Maybe carrot, I thought. Then I looked at the people on either side of me. A few had been fired, two had quit, but eleven of us did remain, and none of us knew what to say. Eleven people—well, twelve including our boss, and five sweets arranged on the large platter that Annis had previously used for our Friday afternoon Jell-O shots. There had always been tons of those.

"Thank you," I finally stated, and there were other murmurs of that, too, but no one moved toward the display on the table. "I'll get a knife," I also stated, and maneuvered myself over to the silverware drawer. Then I cut the goodies into smaller pieces so that there would be enough for everyone. Some of us could have gotten lucky and even scored two mini-servings. I set some napkins on the table; there was no need for plates to carry anything away. As I put the knife into the sink, I saw a single pink box in the garbage with the logo of a bakery with a French name, located in Grosse Pointe. Was that where he lived? Or had he gone out there specially and returned with only five items?

Beckett watched as everyone stepped forward and took a small treat. "Thank you," we all repeated, and the employees began to file out, returning to their drudgery. A woman (I thought her name was Katrina, but Michelle was also a possibility) put the platter into the sink, nodded slightly, and slunk away. She'd been the last person at the "party" besides Beckett, who was looking at the empty table and seemed vaguely pleased in his impassive way.

"That went well," he commented.

Had it? Everyone got a scrap, no one spoke, and then they'd also silently returned to their desks. As a Monday mood-lifter, this hadn't been great. "It was a good thought," I answered, because I did appreciate how he'd tried to do something nice. It was terrible execution, but it was a good thought, which was positive. Maybe I saw it because I was feeling more positive myself. Despite my fear over my workload, I was better today—no, not because of my cookie shard. It was because Sophie's money had hit my account and I had made some payments. It felt much safer to be in debt to my sister, and the decrease in my anxiety made me benevolent. "It was such a nice thought," I assured him.

"I was recalling the margarita parties this department used to have," he commented, and I couldn't help a little sigh of remembrance. Those had been fun. "I thought this might be a replacement."

I nodded. "This is definitely a good start. As a rule of thumb, when you bring stuff here, you should assume at least two items per person."

"Two cookies, for each person? Two brownies?" He got more animated than I'd ever seen him. "That's gluttonous. I can't think of the last time I had even one."

"Well, I've eaten two cookies before and I seem to be ok," I said. "When you're offering people treats, they like to get more than a crumb. No one is faulting the sentiment behind this," I added. "If you're going to do it again next Monday, though, get three times as much. People like to bring stuff home to their kids, too." I, personally, had lived for the days that my dad brought home treats from his office. Somehow, they always tasted better than what we bought or what my mom made with too much wheat germ and too little sugar. She was doing that to keep us healthy, though, which I really did appreciate.

Beckett seemed to be taking in my words. "Please come to my office," he said, and walked out.

I had no idea if I'd offended him with my advice. Why had I bothered to try to help? I should have just let everyone fight over the cookies and not gotten involved dividing anything in the first place. Thanks to my efforts, I'd gotten cream cheese frosting on my blouse and now I had an impromptu meeting with Beckett.

Slowly and unwillingly, my feet led me to his office, where he was already seated and looking hard at his monitors. He gestured with his arm toward one of the chairs, so I took it, and then I just waited. Time was ticking by, and each minute that I sat in here added another minute to my departure time tonight. Not that I really wanted to go home, either. Things there were difficult, and they had been since the woman I'd met last summer, Leni, had moved in with her friend Elissa. It was an arrangement we'd all had to accept, but my apartment was small for three. It felt very small when they had their parties, which were important for their livelihood…anyway, it was difficult.

After a moment of making me sit in silence, he looked up. "I'm aware that several additional employees have considered leaving the company."

No one had directly told me that, but the mood in the department was clear, so I only shrugged a little.

"I can see that they're unhappy with this new situation," he continued.

"That was why you brought the piece of cake?"

"Obviously, we won't be going out together and having margaritas on Thursday afternoons," he said.

I supposed it was a good thing that he hadn't heard about how we'd done shots every Friday in the conference room, or "Apps Tuesday" when we'd all headed down the street to this great Korean barbecue—

"So I thought that baked goods were an appropriate substitute. You obviously feel differently. The quantities were off," he prompted.

"I mean, yes, but that wasn't the only problem. We had a good time when we went out with Annis. Gigi would always do something obnoxious, so that was interesting, and the woman you fired…was her name Olivia? It was either that or Nancy, right?"

"Do you mean Alexis?"

I nodded. "Alexis would drink too much, every time, and overshare. It was always funny. Splitting a brownie with four other people while standing in that lunchroom wasn't interesting or funny."

"An office is for work, not for excessive drinking or nudity," he stated, and he had correctly guessed that nudity had been one facet of Gigi's obnoxious behavior when we'd been together as a group. But then he sighed, an angry little huff. "You were correct when you stated before that it would be difficult to lose everyone at this juncture of our reorganization."

"You mean, it would be tough to have an empty office? No one to do all this new work?"

He looked at me and the corner of his mouth twitched once. "That's what I mean."

"Is your plan to eventually replace us all?"

"No. Not if the current staff can step up and do what's required," he said. "I will bring in more people with actual…"

"Skills," I supplied.

"Legal skills," he specified. "That's obviously needed and it will take some of the workload off the rest of you."

"And you," I added. "Right? If we're doing this much, then you must be, too." He was at his desk when I showed up in the mornings, and he was still there when we all left at night. He had meetings all the time, too, both in the office and out of it.

"It's normal for me," he answered. "You can't make it in New York without putting in the hours. I billed a minimum of sixty per week and usually more, and on top of that, I was always available. There were no nights off, no weekends, no plans. I had to be ready to drop everything and stay at the office until I was done, or just to put in face time with partners."

"Sugar. Well, I can see why you wanted to leave that and become the in-house counsel here. The employee handbook has a big section on work-life balance that the CEO wrote. I think he really meant it, too."

"You read the handbook?"

"My sister made me," I explained. "I have three big sisters and two of them are bossy know-it-alls, and the other one just looks at you and you feel so guilty that you'll do whatever she says."

"That's a power I wish I had," Beckett told me.

"You have to be a really nice, truly good person for it to work." I paused. "Not that you…I'm sure you are."

"I'm not," he answered, and also paused. "I lean bossy know-it-all."

I laughed and his eyebrow quirked up, so I stopped. Maybe it hadn't been a joke.

"Next Monday, I'll seek your advice on appropriate quantities. Thank you for coming in," he told me, and turned back to his monitors. I was dismissed, but again, I wasn't sure why I'd even been in there.

Given my confusion over that encounter, I shouldn't have been surprised by the sudden summons to his office on the following Monday morning. It had been another difficult weekend and I was trying to stay awake by drinking a triple espresso from the gorgeous machine that Annis had bought for the lunchroom, but the drink was so strong that it was making my stomach hurt.

"Juliet, please report to my office."

I nodded at the screen, took another large gulp of bitter coffee to fortify myself, and walked down the hall. "Good morning," I said when I went in. "Did you need something?"

"Good morning," he answered, and then stopped staring at his monitor to thoroughly look me over instead. "Won't you need a coat?"

"Excuse me?"

"I thought we had agreed on a plan for you to accompany me to the bakery to purchase items for the weekly celebration."

"The cookies in the lunchroom? I could give you a list or…sure," I said, changing midstream as his eyebrow raised. It reminded me way too much of when my brother had crashed our grandpa's car (after Patrick had also crashed the one that he and I had used) and my dad's eyebrow had shot practically through the ceiling in his fury. It didn't seem like my boss would get that upset over a bakery purchase, but why tempt fate? "I'll get my coat."

We met again at the elevators when I was properly outfitted for the winter weather outside. He pushed the down button, and I noticed that he had very well-shaped thumbs. Very nice hands in general, with long fingers that seemed strong. He also had monogrammed cuffs on his white dress shirt: BSF.

"What does the S stand for?" I asked as we stepped into the elevator, and I pointed to the letters on his wrist.

"Standish."

"Like the town?"

He checked his phone and frowned. "What? No, it was my ancestor. He was one of the signatories of the Mayflower Compact."

"It's pretty cool that you can trace your family back so far," I said. I knew who my grandparents were, at least on my dad's side. That was about it.

"My paternal line traces back to Mary Boleyn, the sister to the queen of England. That's the sixteenth century."

"Wow, the fifteen hundreds? Holy Mary!"

"No, not that one. Boleyn ," he answered, and I laughed and then looked quickly in his direction to see if it bothered him again. This time, he didn't seem to mind, so maybe that had been a real joke.

He parked on a different floor from where I was allowed to go, and when I saw where we were heading, my feet slowed. "You drive that?" I didn't know a ton about cars, but anyone would have recognized this brand. Also, a guy that my roommate had seen a few times worked in a high-end dealership. He bragged, as they all did, and this particular model was one I'd heard about a lot—I remembered him saying that the headlights alone cost thousands of dollars. I was almost afraid to touch it but luckily, Beckett walked around to open the passenger door for me. I was very careful when I extended the seatbelt, too.

"Is that secure?" he confirmed, and then said, "This was my father's car."

"He didn't want it anymore?"

"There's not a lot of use for vehicles in Hell," he mentioned, and I turned to him in surprise.

"He's dead and you think he went…"

"If there is an underworld, then it's more than likely that he's an inhabitant," my boss said. His tone was conversational and his expression was, as always, pretty empty of emotion. We might have been discussing football scores, or gas prices. I didn't even want to think about gas prices, though, because they were why I was glad that we hadn't taken my car.

"Is that why you came back to Detroit and changed careers?" I asked. "Did your mom need you here after he went, you know, down under?"

"He's definitely not in Australia," he said. "I've been there, and it's a beautiful—"

"Beckett," I broke in, shaking my head, and then couldn't believe what I'd done. I'd interrupted my boss, talking to him like he was one of my siblings or something. And was he making another joke?

He didn't seem to mind what I'd said, though. "My father died when I was fifteen. My mother had passed away several years earlier, when I was eight."

Oh. I remembered how my family had been distraught when our grandparents had died, and I couldn't imagine losing my parents. I couldn't even think about it. "You were young when all that happened. Who raised you?"

"Family. We're going to a bakery near where I grew up," he commented. "What are your thoughts on what we should purchase?"

Our conversation moved away from Hell and we discussed brownies, cookies, and cupcakes for the rest of the way into Grosse Pointe. It was an area I didn't know very well at all, but I was impressed by the houses and the pretty parks. It was cold out but there were people walking and running, with strollers and with little kids on tiny bikes.

"This must have been a nice place to grow up," I said, without thinking. Well, no, it wouldn't have been, not if his mother died when he was so young and his father deserved a place down under. Not in Australia, either.

"It was fine," he answered. I wished I could have read his emotions better, but he was so…what was it? Something about phlegm—phlegmatic. That was the word for him. "Where did you grow up?"

"The West Side," I answered. "It had been my grandparents' house, so my dad grew up there, too. It was a great neighborhood for kids. We were out playing all the time and one of my best friends lived only a few houses away. When we got older, she and I swam together. We were half of the medley relay in our junior and senior years of high school."

"Swimming was an important activity," he noted.

"For me, yes. Did you play sports?"

"I fenced," he said. "I rowed. Golf, of course. Tennis. I've played polo, but I'm not very skilled."

"Oh, I love water polo! It's so vicious. I always two-hand the ball, though."

He glanced over. "I played polo of the horse variety. After college I didn't have much time to devote to any of it."

"Yeah, I don't swim very much anymore, either," I commiserated. "It's hard to get to the pool, but I go sometimes on weekends. I don't enjoy running, like my sisters Nicola and Addie do. Sophie doesn't do squat for exercise, and Brenna said she wants to start studying martial arts and I find that terrifying. Everyone should be afraid. Grace—"

"Just a moment. Are these people all your siblings?"

"There are seven of us," I said. "And no, we're not in a cult." I frequently got that question, along with other ones about birth control. While I got the impression from my parents that so many kids hadn't been totally planned, we also hadn't been unwanted. "My mom was an only child and she dreamed about having a big family, and my dad loved her so much that he went along with it. So I have three older sisters, a twin brother, and two younger sisters."

"One boy out of seven," he noted.

"My mom wanted a son more than anything. My dad isn't like that—I mean, you always hear about men playing football with their sons or teaching them to grill or whatever, but my dad didn't care any more or less about Patrick than he did about the rest of us." Dad had been busy when I was a kid, without a lot of time for football or anything else, because it took a lot to pay for a family of nine. "But my mom has always been crazy about my brother. She still is."

"And she's not crazy about her daughters?"

"I didn't mean that," I said quickly. "She loves all of us. Do you have siblings?"

"I had a younger brother, but he also passed away."

"Sugar, you've lost a lot of people in your life," I said. Poor guy. "When did that happen?"

"I was eight. Here's the bakery."

He'd been eight when his mother had passed, too. Did that mean that his mother and brother had died together? Ugh! It made it hard to breathe when I thought about losing any of my siblings. But he was calmly walking around to open my door and then we entered the quaint little shop. This time, he went the opposite direction from how he'd shopped before—he bought everything, and he probably made the owner's day. Even I was impressed, and also a little overwhelmed.

"Is this good?" he asked me, pointing into the glass case, and when I answered something like, "Sure, everyone loves lemon bars," he got a dozen. Same thing with the eclairs and muffins. They were packing up those boxes as quickly as they could, and finally I had to step in.

"That's definitely enough," I told my boss. "It's probably too much, but I'm sure everyone will appreciate the bounty."

"That will be all," he announced to the clerk. She gave him the grand total, which was so high I couldn't believe it, but he didn't blink. He didn't mind spending a lot if he got the best, I supposed, and I could understand that. She handed over two huge shopping bags filled to the brim.

"This is a really expensive place," I noted as we got into the car. The one where we had shopped as kids with my sister Nicola had been a lot less, especially on half-price Wednesdays. But she had always been close with money and even now, when she was going to inherit so much, I wondered if she would spend enough to enjoy herself.

"Is it expensive?" He shrugged. "I don't go to many bakeries."

"Well, you get what you pay for. I'm sure these will be the best lemon bars I've ever eaten."

"We'll see." He didn't seem to care much.

"Are you going to have any of this? I remember how you freaked out about the cookie."

"What?"

"You said it was gluttonous to eat one. It made me think that your diet is super pure."

"I'm not sure about its purity." The engine purred to life and I appreciated how quiet the brakes were as we left the parking lot. Mine had been making a lot of noise lately.

"I used to eat carefully for months ahead of a taper meet. Now, my diet is pretty poor," I admitted. "A few years ago, my sister Nicola wrote up a life plan for me and there was a big section about nutrition." I should have read the whole plan and stuck to it; too late, now. "Let's see if I'm right about you. What did you have for breakfast?" I asked him.

"Me, this morning?" He thought. "I had green tea with whole wheat toast and fresh fruit."

"What did you put on the toast? Nothing?"

"The fruit," he said, as if butter-less toast was somehow acceptable. "What about you?"

I had to think as well. "I found some candy corn in my dresser from last Halloween that I'd somehow overlooked, so I ate a handful of that. I had half a bottle of iced tea in my car as a chaser and then I drank espresso at the office. I also had some chips. Barbecue, which is my favorite kind," I added.

"That was your breakfast? What you ate to start the day?" he asked, and I nodded. "What do you plan to have for lunch?"

"Well, it was going to be those barbecue chips again, but now it looks like I'll have lemon bars and cookies."

"No," he said, shaking his head. "No, that's repellant. I find your diet offensive."

"Come on. It's not that bad!"

"Your nutritional choices are execrable. Come to my office at twelve-thirty," he ordered.

"Why?"

He wasn't an eye-roll kind of guy, and anyway, he had put on aviator sunglasses so I couldn't have seen it—but I definitely felt that vibe. "We'll have lunch," he told me enunciating the words and simultaneously shaking his head. "A meal with food that wasn't stamped out by a factory."

"Candy corn is natural. At least, it has a vegetable in its name," I pointed out.

"Corn is a cereal grain and the word ‘candy' obviates any nutritional value. Sweet Jesus." But when he looked over at me, I started to laugh. I might have even seen him smile a little as we sped back to the city in his beautiful car.