“The person giving you this blood,” he said, “did so willingly. Hand to God.”

“But you treat them well?”

“No,” he said. “I treat them very well.”

She looked down at the floor, embarrassed.

“I want to keep living my life,” she said.

Sebastian sensed she had more to say. She did.

“I have the most amazing life. I’m going to be taking a tour of Egypt next month—I’m dying to see the pyramids—and then I’m heading to France, where, God willing, I’ll meet a much younger man who will enjoy the company of a much older but hopefully still vibrant woman.”

“He’ll be a lucky man, Ms. Flores.”

“I’m completely shallow. That’s the only benefit of getting older—knowing who and what you really are. I miss being young and pretty because I’m deeply shallow, and I love young and pretty things.” Her gaze drifted back up to him, and she seemed incredibly vulnerable. “Does that make me an awful person?”

“No,” he said. “Makes you human.”

* * *

Ava was still very much on his mind later that morning, for reasons he didn’t completely understand. He hadn’t seen her in a good ten or twelve years, and here he was showing a beachfront home in Pacific Palisades to a bony, blue-eyed blonde named Celine Marcus and thinking about Ava’s home, a modern architectural marvel of stone and glass that sat on half an acre in Hollywood Hills West, high above Sunset Boulevard. He wondered if she still lived there.

When he had been released from prison, he would often drive through her neighborhood—first at night and then, when he felt braver, during the day. He eventually found places where he could safely spy on her using binoculars, watching her for long periods of time while she was inside her house or out in her backyard, gardening or enjoying the pool. Sometimes he would follow her as she ran errands, often with her daughter in tow. He never approached her, because what was the point? She had gotten married and had a kid while he was in prison. She had moved on without him.

It had gone on for almost five years, his spying, this constant craving to punish himself for something that had been stolen from him—which, he would later learn, explained why he had turned from a heavy drinker into a full-blown alcoholic. Frank, his friend since childhood, stepped in, got him into a ninety-day detox and into AA. Frank knew about his obsession with Ava, and Sebastian eventually confessed it to the man who became his AA sponsor, and they both told him he was engaging in alcoholic behavior even though he was no longer drinking, that the only way to move forward was to stop moving backward, and that meant putting his past to rest—his prison sentence, the life taken from him, everything. It meant putting Ava behind him.

And he did.

Or at least he thought he had. So why was he thinking about her now? Why was he thinking back to the last time he’d seen her—not in person but through a pair of binoculars, something he had admitted to no one, including Frank, because he had known it would make him sound like a major-league pervert even though he had never watched her get undressed. That would be wrong. Watching was never about sex. Watching her was about—