Brynne busied herself with her job, her art and the children, and told herself to be patient with Clay. His job was difficult, not to mention dangerous, and the police had recently been under fire in the media.

The first crack in the relationship occurred when Clay’s partner was shot and nearly killed. Then she and Clay had stopped in at a convenience store to buy fountain drinks, and interrupted a holdup.

Clay had wrested the gun from the robber’s hand, and a second bullet had missed him by inches.

He’d taken the incident in stride—This is what it is to be a cop, he’d said—but Brynne, despite previous exposure to the high costs the job too often involved, had been deeply shaken. Before Clay’s partner’s shooting, she’d been one step removed from the realities.

Afterwards, she’d started having nightmares, fretting when Clay came home late.

Impatient, he’d called her clingy, and that single word had wounded Brynne almost as badly as what happened next. Where, she’d wondered, was the line between “understandably concerned” and “clingy”?

And what, exactly, had happened next?

Geoffrey, aka the gym monkey, had showed up at the gallery in a state, demanding to see Brynne now.

She’d been busy with a client, and asked her assistant to take Geoffrey to her office, give him a glass of water, try to calm him down. She’d be with him as soon as possible.

Geoffrey wasn’t having that.

He made a scene.

Brynne had been forced to move to plan B.

Her assistant took over the clients, and she half dragged, half cajoled Heather’s blathering husband out of the main gallery, along the hallway and into her usually quiet office.

Geoffrey, clad in spandex shorts, a skimpy muscle shirt and a pair of very expensive trainers, sank into a chair and began to weep.

Loudly. With plenty of sniffles and snot.

Brynne handed him a box of tissues, took a bottle of water from her private minifridge, and gave it to him with a one-word command. “Drink.”

He drank. Copiously.

The torrent subsided a little, though he was flushed.

“What is it?” Brynne asked, annoyed and oddly jittery. A part of her knew what was coming, though she couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge it just yet.

Geoffrey took care of that little problem.

“They’re cheating,” he blurted. “Heather and Clay, I mean.”

The core of Brynne’s being shifted on its axis.

She collapsed into the chair behind her desk, and began grasping at the proverbial straws. “No,” she said. “They can’t be.”

They can’t be cheating, because I will die if they are.

Because I love Clay Nicholls too much to lose him.

They can’t be cheating because that will be the end and I will probably never see the children again.