Chapter 12

“Idon’t like him at all.”

At times, it was best to shut up and listen, because people just needed to get something out. I kept quiet but I nodded to show that I’d heard and understood.

“I hate him. I hate him, I hate him. He’s like a dirty…gnu.”

Michael had been checking out a lot of books about African wildlife when Jude took them to the library, so he knew what he was talking about. I thought it was actually a very apt comparison because the guy did have a scraggly beard and a big, square head. He was also very large and strong and didn’t seem to possess a lot of social skills, which might also have been true about an animal living on the savannah.

“Next time he comes over to my house to see her, I’m going to hit him in the nose!”

Well, now it was time to step in. “Don’t hit anyone,” I recommended. “Remember what you told me about Isaac Newton.”

“If something happens then there’s going to be a reaction,” Michael said. “So if I hit him in the nose, there would be a consequence.” I nodded hard in agreement with that statement. “Like my mom would get real mad,” he suggested.

“And you don’t know how he would react to a punch in the nose, either,” I stated. “What if he hit you back?”

“My mom wouldn’t let him,” he said confidently, but I didn’t share his trust. She might have tried to stop him, but I didn’t think it would work. I’d met Shannon’s new boyfriend only once and I’d been hugely unimpressed; in fact, every instinct I’d honed in the emergency department about danger and duplicity had lit up when he’d grunted in my direction and hadn’t offered to shake hands or even use any recognizable words in our common language. My gut sent out a “watch out, warning” signal and I trusted in that, just like I trusted it when it told me things about my patients. Shannon’s boyfriend was no good and I wasn’t sure if he might be dangerous, too. I absolutely knew that Michael shouldn’t tempt fate with him.

The other bad news about her boyfriend was that their relationship was my fault—they had met because of me. He was the mechanic who’d fixed her car, the one I’d recommended to her because I had a connection to him through Sergio, Jude’s friend from the woodshop. Sergio said that he and Gnu Guy were acquaintances, not close at all, and he’d seemed confused when I’d shown up at the shop to do some digging.

“I don’t know him that well,” he had answered in response to my many questions. “Why?”

“Because he gives off a bad vibe that Nicola picked up on,” Jude called from where he was doing something with sandpaper. Probably sanding.

But Sergio hadn’t been offered anything concrete about the man’s past or current activities besides restating that he was excellent with engines. Jude had previously volunteered that when he’d taken my car over for its repairs, he hadn’t been impressed with the house or his garage. It had all been run-down and messy, and he’d had a lot of ideas about how it could have been improved. But neither of those pieces of information gave me a lot more insight into the Gnu Guy’s character.

So my detective trip to the woodshop had been for naught, except that I’d brought lunch for Jude and he and I had eaten together. That part had been nice.

I felt certain that the problems with the new boyfriend were more than mess and disorganization. Shannon had let me know weeks before that she always picked terrible men. I had secretly disagreed, since I’d witnessed her performance with the hose when she’d been trying to tempt Jude—she’d wanted him, which attested to excellent judgment. But now that I’d met Gnu Guy, I’d changed my opinion about that. She’d asked me what I thought of him and since she appeared to be aware of her own failings, I assumed that she would appreciate when I said that she’d been right, her taste in men was terrible. I said that she had really picked a rotten apple and that their relationship was doomed to fail.

She was not appreciative in the least. “I like him and so do the kids,” she’s angrily responded, to which I inquired why she had already introduced her new boyfriend to her children since they’d been dating for about fifteen minutes, and she said it was because he’d wanted to take them all out to celebrate her successful job interview at the hospital and it was none of my fucking business, anyway. I replied that it was my business, since I cared about Michael and Tamara and so did Jude, and she’d started sniffling and hugged me. Then she said she was glad that I cared and that they were lucky to have us in their lives.

But despite that, she hadn’t done anything about the boyfriend. They were still seeing each other regularly, and he was often at the house. As for the kids liking him? Now I was hearing the truth from Michael as we watched Jude and Tamara drawing together in the late afternoon sun.

“I won’t punch him, but I hate him,” he told me again. “I hate him.”

“Why?”

He had a lot of reasons and examples to support them, and honestly, it all seemed more than valid to me. When I texted Jude later about our talk, I put it in my own terms: the new boyfriend was rude, disrespectful, and dismissive. I also directly quoted Michael with one specific expression: the guy was a butthole.

“From what she told me before, Shannon has shit for taste,” Jude wrote back. We all knew it, so why was she insisting on staying with this person? I posed that in my next message, but I only got back question marks as an answer.

It was an unusually slow night at Midtown General, which gave me time to work more on Operation Fake Friend. I ended up at the security station talking to Yolanda the guard and Grover, her constant companion there when he wasn’t driving the shuttle bus route.

“Your neighbor sounds like my daughter,” he volunteered when I’d told them about Shannon. “Damn but Daija could pick ‘em wrong. From the time that she was thirteen to the time that she was thirty, I hated every one of her boyfriends.”

“You let her date at age thirteen?” Yolanda squeaked, and they had a prolonged argument about the proper age to have a boyfriend or girlfriend and what that word should encompass.

“Anyway, my daughter figured things out,” Grover told me after he’d acquiesced and agreed with his friend that thirteen had been too young. “Now Daija is married to a guy I like a lot and they have a beautiful family. Have I shown you my grandchildren?”

“They’re precious,” Yolanda told me, and he beamed. “All he wants to do is stare at pictures of those babies on his phone.”

“That’s what you’re always looking at?” I asked.

“Not always. Often,” he conceded, and he did show me many, many shots of his grandchildren, and they were very cute. I told him so frequently, which did much to advance Operation Fake Friend but also happened to be my honest opinion. They were adorable and, he promised, brilliant.

“So, what made your daughter finally smarten up?” I asked him.

“She was always smart,” he answered, bristling a little.

“She sure was dumb about men,” Yolanda told him. She didn’t back down when he turned a hard stare on her. “You know it, Grover!”

He admitted that he did know it. “My wife says that Daija was always trying to twist things around to make the guy right enough, instead of picking the right one from the beginning.”

“But why?” I persisted.

“She was afraid of being alone. She liked having a man in her life.”

“Who doesn’t?” Yolanda murmured.

“My wife says that Daija had to learn that she was fine on her own, she didn’t need anyone to make her complete.”

“Your wife is a smart woman,” his friend agreed.

“The grandbabies get it from her,” he said, smiling. “They’re brilliant.”

They very well might have been, but Shannon’s behavior wasn’t. I’d added my concerns about her and the kids to the list of other things that I was currently worrying about, only major issues that were potentially life-altering or life-destroying. The top of that list was Eddie and what we were going to do about his future. Actually, before I’d added Shannon’s boyfriend, he and my sister Sophie were the only items written on that page. She was still ensconced in her pigpen house, and he was still insisting that he was going to leave his.

In fact, he had already retained a real estate agent. Unfortunately for me, I’d made it easy for him to sell by paying off his second mortgage and some liens that had been on the property. I’d worked on his credit and it still wasn’t great after all the problems he’d had in his life, but it was now good enough that he would probably be able to rent an apartment. We weren’t talking much but I knew that he had suggested all kinds of inappropriate places to Jude, like buildings that were too close to Greektown where he’d be tempted by the casinos (and he’d had gambling issues) or too far out in the suburbs where he’d be away from the city he loved. And away from me.

For now, he was absolutely refusing to take any money from me, either. We held joint accounts and when I made deposits, he’d take them out and force the cash back on me. That was a terrible system because it meant that he had large amounts of money loose in his house, ripe for the stealing. He kept telling me not to come over and I was still having difficulties getting there as much as I wanted to anyway, because I was also involved in working on my own house with Jude, and the kids were alone all day with nothing to do and I didn’t like that, so I’d been devising activities just like when my own siblings had been younger…

I had a lot going on. Yes, there were only three things on that list of major concerns, but I wasn’t doing a good job of tackling any of them—which meant that the solutions were far off and unattainable at the moment. I didn’t like that. It made me uneasy as well as really, really tired.

“Nicola, can you work your magic on one of my beds in Fast Track?” one of the other nurses called to me. I had never known her name until I had started Operation Fake Friend, but now I was aware that it was Amparo and she was really nice, nice but new to the ED and somewhat naive. When I walked over to talk, I saw that she also looked nervous. “He’s saying that there’s something wrong with his leg but he won’t let me see it,” she told me.

There was never a good reason for a patient to hide their problems. There was usually a bad reason, though, like maybe embarrassment, or maybe illegality.

“He says that he’s going to leave,” she continued.

“Let him,” I told her. “His poor choices are up to him.”

She nodded, but still hesitated. “He doesn’t look right,” she said.

“Come on and we’ll talk to him together,” I answered, and the moment I saw the patient, I knew that she had been correct: he was in distress, but he wasn’t going to let me examine his leg, either. He had a hat pulled down low and he wouldn’t look up so I could see his eyes, but I noticed the droplets of sweat running down his neck. I watched his stomach move and counted the breaths he took, and there were a lot.

“You can leave and we’re not going to stop you, but you came all this way,” I told him. “Your problem is bad enough that you’re here in the emergency room and you’re sweating with pain or fever. Do you think it will get better if you go?”

He swore and we waited. “You can look,” he mumbled, and pointed at his left calf. I knelt and lifted up the leg of his pants to reveal a large dressing that someone had secured with tape, not surgical but duct. The moment I started to cut open the bandages, I smelled the infection and when I saw the wound, seeping and purulent, I knew what had caused it.

“Ok, so we’re going to go grab some supplies to treat you,” I told him, and I looked up into his face. He stared back at me without recognition, but I knew him, and for a moment, I thought my heart might have skipped out of rhythm. Yes, I’d seen this patient before and I remembered exactly where: he’d been walking on Spring Street weeks ago, right in front of Eddie’s place. He’d been moving slowly and I’d thought at the time, checking me out. But now I realized that I hadn’t been correct: he’d actually been checking out the house and he’d come back again with a friend when I wasn’t around. They’d stolen Eddie’s money, his medication, and his TV. It looked like this guy had taken one of his bullets, too, when Eddie had shot at them and thought that he’d clipped one of the thieves in the leg.

“We’ll be right back, and you don’t need to worry. We’re going to help you.” I smiled at him as I stood up and then tapped Amparo on the shoulder so that she followed me out of the bay.

“Go tell the officer who’s talking to Yolanda that we have a GSW,” I said quietly. We were required by law to report all gunshot injuries—we still treated people, of course, but we also got the police involved.

“That was a bullet wound?” Her eyes immediately swiveled back toward the patient before she yanked them away, and she kept calm. “Ok. I got it.”

“Tell her that I think I know where and how he was shot, too.”

“In his calf with a gun?” she confirmed.

I had to count to three before I spoke. “Yes, and I think it happened during a robbery on Spring Street. I know the homeowner.”

Then I went back to the patient and started working on his severely infected wound, the one caused by Eddie’s bullet being left untreated for all this time. Even if I wanted to kill him myself for scaring and stealing from an old man, I would still treat him. First, I would need to remove that duct tape from his extremely hairy leg. “Next time, don’t use this,” I recommended, and then I yanked. There was a lot of tape to remove.

A few hours later that morning, I waited for Jude to get out of the shower so that I could tell him what had happened. He didn’t react as I expected him to, with excitement and amazement that I’d singlehandedly—with the help of the Detroit Police—apprehended one of Eddie’s burglars.

No, he didn’t seem excited or amazed; he seemed very upset. “You were alone with that guy? What if he’d gone after you?”

“I wasn’t alone with him when they arrested him. While I worked on his leg, Yolanda the security guard stood right outside so she was ready to jump in if necessary, and DPD was already onsite about another guy who was under arrest for felony DUI. It worked out great.”

“Yep, sounds great.” Except he still sounded very upset. “I don’t think you should be around people like that. Especially after you just got assaulted,” he told me.

“Then I’m in the wrong line of work,” I answered. “A lot of people come in there and no matter what bad stuff they’ve done, we help them.”

He took a breath and then nodded. “You even help the assholes who get pushed out of cars and then throw up on your shoes.”

“Even them. Actually, guys like that are my favorites. I really like them.”

“You mean you’re letting other men puke on you?” He reached out and put his fingertips gently on the side of my face, on where the worst of the bruise had been after the kick. Then he gently rubbed my cheekbone with his thumb. “Go to bed and I’ll see you later, Sherlock Holmes.”

I watched him walk out to the driveway and open the garage door. There was room for two cars in there so it made sense that he should also park inside, but he’d been surprised when I’d suggested the idea. He paused as he got to the street and then waved to me and to Tamara, who’d opened her front door to see him. Michael slept in, but she always got up early. When she looked at me, I mimicked sleep, resting my cheek on my hands, and she nodded and waved again before she shut the door. They would be busy with some educational activities that I’d organized until their mom got home in the afternoon. I walked up the stairs with my hands still pressed to my cheek but I wasn’t thinking about how my own fingers felt. I was imagining instead when Jude had touched me there.

Yes, I really liked him. He really was my favorite.

When I woke up a few hours later, I had a list of things to do during the afternoon already prepared in my journal. I first felt for my glasses as I yawned, and then I pushed the mess of my hair back from my face. It wasn’t as curly as my sister Grace’s was and it wasn’t pin-straight like Juliet’s, and it wasn’t as dark as Sophie’s and it wasn’t as…well, I could admit privately that Addie’s hair tended toward orange, but I never would have said that aloud. It definitely wasn’t as perfectly styled as Brenna’s was, either, but I’d been making more of an effort lately, and Tamara always liked to brush and braid it, too.

Thinking of my sisters made me want to talk to them, so I reached for my phone to resurrect the old group chat that we used years before so I could say hello to everyone at once. But before I could type anything to them, I saw that I had a bunch of messages already and before I could even open the app, I got another one.

I glanced at what it said and then I was out of bed and I was calling as I ran down the stairs. “Michael? Are you ok?” I asked when he answered.

“Yeah,” he said, but I heard him sniff.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” I told him, and I meant his mom but I also heard Tamara in the background, crying.

“I don’t know where she is,” he told me. “She was supposed to be here a few hours ago and we were going to the library.”

“I know.” I knew that because I had set it all up. They had these great summer programs…not important right now. “I’m coming over.”

“We were knocking on your door but you didn’t hear,” he told me.

I was already through my door and hurrying across the street. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Did you call Jude?” But sometimes he went for the whole day without looking at his phone. He left it tucked away in the nasty “breakroom” where there was also a disgusting refrigerator that I thought was too filthy for his lunch…also not important right now.

“He didn’t answer.” Another sniffle.

“I’m at your house, it’s me knocking.”

Their front door jerked open and caught on some clothes, junk mail, and school stuff from the last academic year that was piled there. “Nicola,” Tamara wailed, and ran over to hug me.

I’d never actually touched the kids like this, but I held out my arm to Michael and he stepped right in for a hug, too. “You guys, I’m sure your mom is fine,” I told them.

“She always answers when I text her. Always,” Michael said. “If she’s going to be late, she tells us. Where is she?”

Honestly, I was worried as well. She was hours and hours late, and it definitely wasn’t like her to blow off these kids. I had to wonder if there was some connection to her new boyfriend, Gnu Guy: he’d shown up in their lives and now she didn’t. It made me extremely angry but I tried to mask it in front of the children.

“Why do you look so mad?” Tamara wondered.

“I’m not. Did you have lunch?” I asked, and they shook their heads. It was late for that, too. “Come over to my house and I’ll make something to eat.” Food happened and they did cheer up slightly once their stomachs were full and they felt assured that they had somewhere safe to be.

“Because we could live here with you and Jude, right, Nicola? You would let us, right?” Tam asked me.

“You’re not going to have to live here because your mom will come home soon, but yes, you can always stay over,” I answered. “Why don’t you hang out in the shed for a while? I need to get dressed.” I needed to go over to Eddie’s house and I really couldn’t skip it, but Shannon wasn’t responding to me, either. So by the time that I was fully bathed and clothed, I’d decided to take them with me. I’d also texted Jude and asked for his opinion on this situation, and by now he’d checked his phone. He said that he’d leave the shop as soon as he could and would meet us wherever we were, and I could tell that he was worried, too.

The kids were further concerned about leaving our street because they wanted to wait for their mom, but I thought that a change of scenery would be good for them, and I also had to go see Eddie and collect that cash that he was hoarding, the money that I’d deposited in his account and he’d withdrawn in anger. On top of that, I wanted to see him because I wanted us to make up. I couldn’t leave this situation to fester like a criminal’s bullet wound.

“You remember Eddie, right?” I asked, and glanced in the rearview mirror at the back seat where they were glumly staring out the windows.

They both nodded. “Yeah. He knows a lot about baseball,” Michael said.

“I think he used to play semi-pro,” I responded, and then explained, “Semi-professionally, like he wasn’t quite good enough to get to the highest level but he was still really good.” I had heard stories, but I kept back the rest of the details of his baseball career as Eddie has described them to me. According to him, he’d been dismissed from that team because he’d been caught with the manager’s wife in the clubhouse, and they’d been doing something that a married woman should have only partaken in with her husband. Also, from what I understood, she and Eddie had been engaged in a few things that I didn’t think many women ever did, married or not. He’d laughed his head off when he’d described the scene to me, of him upside-down and the woman—

“Oh, are those dogs fighting? Poor doggies!” Tamara said sadly. “Nicola, can you go help them?”

“Don’t be a ding-a-ling. She’s a nurse for people, not for dogs,” her brother told her.

“She’s not a ding-a-ling. But you should never, ever get involved in a dog fight.” I had plenty of stories about bites that I also kept to myself.

“What should you do instead?” she asked me.

I had no idea.“In any emergency, the most important thing is to keep calm,” I answered vaguely.“Even when that’s hard, you have to try your best.”

“Is that a pile of trash on fire?” Michael asked next.

Maybe I shouldn’t have brought them here. “We’re going right inside the house,” I said, and then remembered Eddie’s gun. I had no idea where he kept it and I had no idea what else he might have secreted away in there. “And you can’t touch anything,” I added, and then glanced in the back seat and sighed. This wasn’t going to work. “We’re just going to pick him up and then bring him back to my house instead.”

I called and texted at a stop light to let Eddie know the new plan but since he was ignoring me, he didn’t respond. So I parked in his driveway and pounded on his door until he finally opened it.

“You? What do you want?” he greeted me.

“Why is there a ‘for sale’ sign in your yard?” I demanded.

“I thought you would have learned to read to get through all that schooling you did. The sign doesn’t say that. It says, ‘Coming soon.’”

“You weren’t going to talk to me about it first? Holy Mary, Eddie! After everything that’s happened with us?”

He looked past me. “Who’s that? Is she the girl who lives across the street from you?”

“Hi!” I heard Tamara say and there was Michael right next to her, as if they hadn’t heard me tell them to stay where they were with the doors locked. “It’s hot in the car,” she explained.

“Eddie, we’re going to my house,” I announced. “Everybody, we’re leaving.”

It took a lot to get Eddie into my little car, making me wish again that I had enough extra cash lying around to buy a van that would have accommodated his chair. As it was, I was glad to be strong and the kids, bless them, helped out as much as they could. When we were finally set, and as I wiped the sweat from my face, I saw the neighbor across the street come out onto her porch and wave. She seemed to be trying to signal to me.

“Hello,” I answered, and she carefully came down the steps and walked toward us, limping a lot.

“Nicola, we’re hot!” Tamara said inside the car, so I went ahead and started it and cranked the air, but I stayed near the door so that no one could jump in and take off with them. It meant that instead of me meeting her, the neighbor lady unfortunately had farther to walk, but she made it after a while. As she slowly approached, I heard Eddie talking to the kids and I fervently hoped that he was keeping his stories clean.

“Hi there,” the woman greeted me, and she looked through the passenger window and waved at Eddie, who ignored her. “I’m Monique.” I said that I was Nicola, and hello. “I saw that sign in his yard,” she went on. “Is he really going to sell?”

I swallowed, but then—he wasn’t a child. It was his property, and he could do what he wanted without having to heed my advice or pay a whit of attention to my worries. “I think he plans to,” I answered.

“My daughter would love to live on this block, closer to me,” she said, and narrowed her eyes as she appraised the house. It did look better now that Jude had been working on the exterior, but I was privy to the reality beneath the improved fa?ade.

“It needs a new roof and it has water damage,” I told her, which was honest, but I wasn’t trying to use it to bludgeon Eddie. I just couldn’t let someone buy this place without knowing the truth about it, and anyway, I assumed they’d find out about the problems during the sale.

“I figured it would be bad,” she said. “He’s never done a lick of work to keep it up and neither did his mother. That woman was a stingy bitch.”

“Oh.”

“Never took care of her kids, always off with some man.”

I thought of Shannon and hoped that wasn’t what she was doing, but if she wasn’t off with her new man, then where was she? Something might have been really wrong.

“Anyway, before he sells, tell him he better talk to me because we might want to do an off-the-market kind of thing,” she continued. “Ol’ Eddie and I can come to an understanding like we always have.”

“Do you two know each other well?”

“Real, real well,” she answered, and got a smile that told me all I needed to know about their relationship.

“I’ll tell him,” I said, and got into the car as she started back towards her porch. “Eddie, your friend from across the street would like to have a word with you. About real estate,” I specified.

“You have a friend across the street, too?” Tamara asked him, and he got a big smile just like Monique’s.

“A few years ago, she was a great friend. Maybe about twenty, twenty-five years,” he said after he’d thought about it. Then he turned to me, still with that stupid grin. “Memories,” he mentioned.

“Exactly. You have a lot of memories in that house. If you move…”

“I’ll still have the memories. I just won’t have the leaking roof,” he said, and he lost the grin and sighed in a way that sounded tired. “I want to move, Nicola. Whether or not you want me to stay, I want to go.”

“We’re moving,” Tamara mentioned.

“Wait, what?” I almost turned around to look at her, but I was the driver. “You guys are moving? Why?”

“My mom says that the landlord is going to raise the rent. She told us yesterday that she’s looking for another place,” Michael answered.

Maybe that was what she was doing, then. She’d gotten involved in an apartment hunt…no, she never would have forgotten the kids.

“If she finds one far away, we may have to go to a different school,” he told us glumly.

“I don’t want to, because I love my teacher,” his sister said.

“You’ll have a different teacher next year anyway, ding-a-ling,” he informed her, and that started an argument.

Shannon hadn’t said anything to me about leaving, and I didn’t think she had told Jude…oh, no. I suddenly had a thought about why she might have kept it to herself: she was going to move in with the car repair guy, the boyfriend she’d known for fifteen minutes. It was a terrible idea, absolutely awful. But I’d seen plenty of women jump into things with men before, both my colleagues and patients who had ended up in the emergency department because of their new living arrangements going really wrong.

“Sugar,” I muttered, and I tried to get more information out of the kids, but they didn’t know too much except that they didn’t want to go. They would miss the shed, of course, but they both acknowledged that they would miss Jude a lot. And me, they added.

“I would miss you, too,” I agreed. I didn’t want them to move away and I certainly didn’t want them to move in with her boyfriend. I would definitely be adding this to my journal in the “major problems” section.

I’d told Jude where we would be and he showed up just as we were getting home, which meant he could help Eddie get out of the car. “Good to see you,” he said as he did so. “I’m glad you decided to stop being a jackass and talk to Nicola. Nice that you’re finally relenting when she’s been worried sick. Remember that talk we had about acting like adults?”

“Yeah, good afternoon and all that bullshit,” Eddie growled back. “I’m always happy to see someone who starts off by calling me names. Asshole.” And then, as I was ushering the kids away and he was warming up with some language that was even stronger, we all saw a familiar car turn onto our street.

“Mommy!” Tamara called, and both she and Michael bolted across to their own driveway before I could stop them. When she got out, they threw themselves on her, totally happy again, but I was extremely angry. I looked both ways and then also crossed to where she’d parked.

“Shannon,” I said as the kids ran inside and she started to walk toward their front door. She didn’t break her stride. “Hey, stop!” I barked, and she finally paused.

“Hi, Nicola. I’m sorry if they bothered you.”

I waved my hand in dismissal. “Where were you? Why didn’t you answer them?”

“I got held up and I lost my phone.”

Clearly, she was lying. She was doing the thing that some patients tried when they wanted to seem truthful: she was making unwavering, unblinking eye contact. No one who was actually honest stared in that way, so it was always obvious that they were either high or prevaricating. Shannon didn’t have other drug hallmarks; what she’d just told me about her phone was a fabrication.

“The kids are ok,” she said defensively. “I would have come faster if…if I could have.” She couldn’t maintain the eye contact, so she mumbled that last statement to her shoes. She was really bad at this.

“So you have to get a new phone?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’ll do it tomorrow.” She was still addressing the ground. “Why do you care?”

“Because they were crying and scared,” I said, and she looked up suddenly, stricken. “They’re ok,” I assured her.

“Of course they are! What do you want, Nicola?”

I moved onto another issue. “Tam said that you’re moving,” I told her. “Are you?”

“It’s not settled yet.” She glanced toward her house. “I better go make them lunch.”

It was closer to dinner time. “I already did that. Shannon, what’s going on?”

“Nothing,” she said, except now, she was talking to her shoes again. “I’ll see you later.”

I watched her enter her house and then re-crossed the street to break up the argument between Eddie and Jude. Maybe my housemate claimed not to have a temper, but Eddie sure did.

“I thought you were on my side. It was you and me against her!” he was saying loudly, almost shouting, and he pointed at me.

“I thought we were going to be adults and discuss things,” Jude answered, much more calmly. “I’m not ganging up on Nicola. I’m convincing her.”

“Your way of convincing is a lot like ganging up,” I told him. Like the two of them discussing my past without my permission, because even if it was Eddie’s past, too…it wasn’t a topic to bring up, ever.

“I’m not teaming up with him to fight you,” Jude said, and Eddie said that he should. “We’re not fighting,” he replied to that. “Remember how we all want what’s best for each other? We still have different ways to go about it.” He stepped to my side and put his arm around my waist, so his way was obviously to overpower me with his unbelievable cuteness and charm to make me lose my mind. I tried to hold firm against this dangerous tactic, even when he pulled me a little closer to his body.

“Nicola, I’m done with arguing,” Eddie told me tiredly. “You don’t have a say about my house, anyway.”

No matter if I did or didn’t, I would have argued back. But despite my best intentions, I was already falling victim to Jude. I had leaned slightly against his side and I found that my hand was sneaking up to rest on his stomach. No, no! I shoved it into my pocket. Luckily, I had plenty of them in these cargo shorts.

“We’ll work this all out,” my housemate said. “Just so we’re clear, though, there will be no ganging up, and if things get ugly, I will chose a side. I’m with her.”

“I see,” Eddie said, but he didn’t seem mad about it. “I see.”

I looked up at Jude and he smiled at me. “Even when it pisses you off, I’m with you,” he told me.

I felt like there were going to be some things coming up and I was going to be glad to have him. I let myself lean more, and I already felt that way.