My eyes must have bugged out, cartoonlike. Nick—Nick—lay on top of the covers, dressed in his snappy gray burial suit, with his hands cupping the back of his head. Except for a peculiar greenish glimmer emanating from his skin, he looked pretty much the way he had before he collided with a semi on the 101 North and was thrown through the windshield of his BMW. Along with Tiffany, Nick’s lover du jour, who was scarred for life and for some insane reason blamed me for her Frankenstein face and deflated implants.

One of the many things I don’t like about dead people is that a lot of them glow in the dark. Not that I’d seen any before my late ex-husband turned up that momentous night, a full two years after his funeral. Since then, unfortunately, I’ve become something of an authority.

“Hey,” Nick said companionably, as though the situation were entirely normal, and not something out of an old segment of Unsolved Mysteries.

My stomach quivered. Like my heart, it was threatening to leap out of my throat and make a run for it.

“You’re dead,” I pointed out—quite reasonably, I thought, given the circumstances. I knew he’d croaked, but I wasn’t sure he’d been notified. He looked so calm and matter-of-fact, as though turning up in his ex-wife’s bed in the middle of the night was a perfectly ordinary thing to do.

Nick sighed, slipped his hands from behind his head and hoisted himself as far as his elbows. “Sort of,” he admitted, with a rueful note.

I managed a step backward, ready to hot-foot it out of there, jerk open the outside door, and dash down the fire escape–style stairway to Bad-Ass Bert’s Biker Saloon. Normally, I didn’t seek out the company of Bert’s clientele, especially when I was naked except for a slip of cotton jersey that barely covered my thighs, but given the situation, I was game for just about anything. Trouble was, once I’d retreated half a stride, I couldn’t seem to move again.

“How can you be ‘sort of’ dead?” I asked.

“It’s complicated,” Nick replied. “In some ways, I’m more alive than you are.” With that, he swung his legs over the side of the mattress and stood up, turning to face me across the expanse of tangled bedding. The glow surrounding his lean frame flickered a little, as if somebody had turned a celestial dimmer switch.

“Relax,” he said. “It’s okay.”

Sure. No problem. Pay no attention to the walking, talking corpse.

“You’re dead,” I repeated stubbornly.

“Yeah,” he agreed wryly. “I’ve noticed. So maybe we could get past that?”