Something in his voice catches me. Something I have never heard. A vulnerability there. “I care about you, Mike.”

He laughs, the sound hollow in tone. “You care about what I do for you.”

“I’m not gonna massage your back and gush out compliments. You don’t want to believe it, don’t believe it.”

“I don’t need the compliments. Just check on your boyfriend, okay?” He hangs up the phone before I can ask for Jeremy’s address, an embarrassing request. Something a real girlfriend should know. A text from Mike, thirty seconds later, provides it without my needing to ask. I send a silent bit of thank-you karma his way and plug the address into my GPS. Eight miles, fourteen minutes away. I’ll get there in half that, providing I don’t get pulled over on the way. I slow down a bit, just to behave.

I’m coming, baby. I cross my fingers and hope he is fine, asleep on the couch, his sexy ass stretched out, pillow marks deep on his face. I don’t stop myself when the speedometer inches higher.

CHAPTER 107

IT IS BREATHING, the oven taking measured sighs as it ticks its way to warmth. It is alarming, the awareness of it near Jeremy’s head. He doesn’t know why it’s alarming, but it is out of place, as out of place as his hands and feet being bound on the kitchen floor. Out of place is worrisome. He hasn’t used the oven much, frozen pizzas being the main course entering and exiting its depths. The old oven was faulty, two hundred degrees one moment, four hundred the next. So he replaced it, a few months ago, the stainless steel fixture the only bit of this kitchen younger than him. Six or seven pizzas have made their way through those doors, eggs have been cooked on its surface, grilled cheeses flipped on frying pans. There is no reason why, randomly, the oven would turn on. It shouldn’t. Jeremy lies there, mind working, and starts to smell pizza.

CHAPTER 108

JEREMY’S NEIGHBORHOOD IS Beverly Hills compared to my slum, but nothing that my highbrow mother would have approved of. Small cottages built in the ’40s or ’50s, the trees have taken over, dwarfing everything, casting heavy shade on anything and everything their large arms felt the need to cover, the homes barely visible behind decades of overgrown hedges and small yards. In my haste I miss his house, circle the block again, and examine the numbers again. Recognize his truck and pull in.

Marcus is dead. He can’t be waiting behind door number Jeremy, a knife in hand, ready to assault me as I walk through the door. But I am still cautious, my turnoff of the engine heavy and slow. What if he is dead? What if this man killed Jeremy just to hurt me, then came to my apartment? I never let Marcus speak, I got too fucking excited and killed him too soon. If Jeremy is dead, I will kill Mike. It doesn’t matter that this is my fault. Fuck him for blabbing. He should have lost his fingers like a man. Share my money but don’t share details that endanger an innocent person. I open the car door, take a deep breath, and close my eyes. Say a quick prayer that he is alive.

My eyes are still closed when the house explodes.

PART 5

There are no lights. There is no pink.

CHAPTER 109

YOU WOULD THINK that ash would be hot. Floating through the air, coming off of a fire. But it’s not. It’s like whispers on my cheeks. Like gray snow, slightly damp in its arrival. I open my eyes and try to understand its presence. Try to understand why I am on the ground, a strange ground, looking up at oak trees that flicker in the light of a fire. I take a shaky breath and hear the crackle of wood settling, the crash of something falling.

Fire.

Ash.

I jerk to my feet, the world tilting briefly, and the sound of sirens starts, muted. The sound growing louder. Closer. An ambulance. Cops. I find my bearings, reach a hand out, grab hold of the side of my car and stare at the furnace before me. A kindling square of home, crackling into the night, Jeremy’s truck silhouetted before it. I drop to my knees and scream his name.

My scream. It is so familiar that I try to stop it, the sound ripping me back into my childhood kitchen, the howl of anguish and regret so similar in pitch to my mother’s that I am sick. Is this how she felt? When she looked around and saw the destruction that she had created? I try to close my mouth, try to stop the sound, try to block out the fire and the blood and my sister’s face and the man that I love and all I can think is that I turned him away. Jeremy wanted to come with me and I pushed him away in the parking lot. I pushed him away and now he is dead. He is dead and I can’t stop the scream. I repeat his name, screaming it to the fire, to the gods above, to the man that I hope is alive to hear it.

CHAPTER 110