Marie-Terese was out of the car by the time he came around, and her eyes were going over every inch of the house, from stoop to flashing.

He took her arm and led her up to the front door. As he unlocked and opened the way, the scent of artificial lemon rolled out like a welcome mat, but it was a false greeting, as fake as the chemicals that were approximating the smell.

Together, they stepped through the jambs and he flipped on the hall light, then closed the door and cranked the heat on.

Cold. Damp. Disordered. In contrast to the exterior, the house inside was a mess. He’d left it exactly as it had been the day his parents had fallen down the stairs together: an artifact of ugliness.

“Yup, this is what I grew up in,” he said roughly, looking down at the only fresh stretch of rug in whole the house—which was at the foot of the staircase. Where they’d landed after they’d fallen from the top landing.

As Marie-Terese looked it all over, he went into the living room and clicked on a lamp so she could also see the ratty sofa with the bald patches on the arms…and the low coffee table with the cigarette burns…and the bookshelves that were still filled more with his mother’s empty vodka bottles than anything you could read.

Man, the light was not kind to the orange-and-yellow drapes that hung with wilted exhaustion from their wrought-iron rods or the faded rug that had a worn track leading from the couch into the kitchen.

His skin was crawling as he walked over to the archway and hit the light switch for the fixture over the stove.

What should have been Betty Crocker awesome was even worse than the living room: The Formica countertops were stained with circles left by cans that had sat for weeks, bleeding rust onto the surface. The refrigerator with its loose handle was harvest gold, or probably had been when it had been bought—now it was hard to tell how much had been intentional color choice and what was decay and dust. And the pine cabinets…what a mess. Originally they’d been glossy, but they were now dull, and the section of them that was under the old leak in the ceiling had strips of varnish bubbling up from the wood like streaks of poison ivy on skin.

He was so ashamed of it all.

This was his real estate Dorian Gray, the rotting reality he kept locked in his proverbial closet while to the rest of the world he presented only beauty and wealth.

Vin glanced over his shoulder. Marie-Terese was wandering around, her mouth slightly parted, as if she were watching a scene in a movie that had shocked the shit out of her.