“I love the way the natural light fills the room,” Celine Marcus said, her voice echoing in the cool, cavernous space. The current owners had been forced to unload all the furniture in the house in a fire sale. “So beautiful and peaceful.”

“Absolutely.”

Celine turned to the picture windows overlooking the backyard, with its pool and private spa, the thick lawn and the covered patio with its ample alfresco dining space. Sebastian turned his thoughts back to the last night he’d seen Ava. He had watched her getting ready for bed, coming out of her bathroom, her hair still damp from the shower. She wore a pair of gray boy shorts and a matching tank top, her Colombian skin dark with a summer tan, her curves still there but firm with muscle. She slid into the king-sized bed she shared with her husband—the bed empty a lot, he saw, her husband, some sort of hedge fund douchebag, out entertaining clients most nights—and Sebastian thought, I should be lying there next to her. He would have had that life with her if the judge hadn’t sent him off to prison for beating someone to death—even though it was self-defense and an accident.

“The architecture,” Celine said, “is beautiful.”

Ava had visited him every Saturday the first two months and then stopped when she got into a bad car accident that broke her leg and injured her spine. Prison didn’t allow him access to a phone, unless he was contacting his lawyer, and he couldn’t use email, but it did allow good, ol’-fashioned snail mail, and she wrote to him—long letters at first, then, by the end of his fourth month, short and vague notes featuring highlights from her life, the sort of thing you wrote to a long-distance aunt or cousin out of obligation. Five months into his life sentence the letters had reduced to a trickle, and then they stopped. No more visits, either.

His mother visited him, though, every Saturday, until the bone cancer progressed. Frank brought his mother up every Saturday. Frank continued to visit him when his mother no longer could. Frank was the one who had told him that Ava had moved in with another man. Told her she had gotten married. Was pregnant.

His phone vibrated once; he’d received a text.

It was from Frank. Two words: Call ASAP.

“Excuse me for a moment, Mrs. Marcus.”

Sebastian went outside, through the front door. He could hear waves lapping in the distance as he made the call. Frank picked up immediately.

“What’s up?” Sebastian asked.

“Not what. Who. Your stepson.”

Sebastian bristled. He hated it when Frank—hell, when anyone—used that word. Paul wasn’t his stepson—not in any legal way, Paul simply being a part of the package when Trixie moved in . . . Christ, twenty-two years ago? Had it been that long? It had, he realized; Paul had been two, still in diapers. They had never married, he and Trixie—had just lived together until the day she died. It was coming up on a year now, her death, Trixie marooning him with her now twenty-four-year-old son, Paul, full of ugly tattoos and misplaced anger and confidence.