And the sex-before-marriage thing? Turned out that hadn’t been a big sacrifice for him because he’d been sleeping with his various mistresses—and she’d learned this when one had turned up with a belly the size of a basketball about a month after the ink was dry on the marriage license.

Coming back to the present, she got to her feet with the rest of the congregation and sang words from the hymnal that Robbie held in his hands.

Considering what the past had taught her, she worried about the fairy tale she’d spun in her head about Vin.

Optimism wasn’t for the faint of heart. And daydreams could get you in troubnle.

He sat behind her and she never knew it. Which was the beauty of disguises.

Today he was wearing his churchgoer one, which meant blue contact lenses and wire-framed glasses.

He’d waited in the back of the church for her to come in with the son, and when the two didn’t show up, he’d figured they were missing the service for once and still back home. He’d left and gone to his car, but as he’d been driving away, he’d seen the two of them on the sidewalk, talking intently. Circling the block, he’d watched them talk together until they had run into the cathedral and disappeared through the big doors.

By the time he’d reparked his car, he’d missed half the service, but he’d managed to sit right behind her and the son, slipping from the shadows and lowering himself into the pew.

She spent most of the service staring up at the frescoes that were being cleaned, her head tilted to the side so that the angle of her cheek was especially lovely. As usual, she was dressed in a long skirt and a sweater—today they were a deep maroon—and she had a pair of pearl earrings on. Her dark hair was coiled up in a loose bun and she was wearing light perfume…or maybe it was just that laundry detergent or those dryer sheets she used?

He’d have to go to the supermarket and sniff the Tides and Cheerses and Gains and Bounces, to see which one it was.

Sitting in the pew, she looked like such the Good Mother, helping her son find the right pages in the hymnal, bending down from time to time when he had a question to ask her. No one would even have used the word slut within hearing distance of her…much less apply it to her: She seemed to be one of those women who had immaculately conceived her child.