Except now, in spite of the fact that neither was in cuffs, she couldn’t lose the feeling that they were both tied up together . . . and that the foiled corks of all the bottles were a firing squad on the verge of getting the let-loose signal.

God, when he’d been brought in to meet with her that first time, she’d had no idea what she was getting into.

Then again did you ever? As people went through their daily lives, off-the-cuff choices and random events could sometimes spiral into a kind of centrifugal force that sucked you in and then spun you out into a different zip code altogether.

Even if you never left your own house.

Her father sat closest to the door and linked his hands together as he put his elbows on top of the table.

“We’re safe down here,” he said, nodding to an air vent up by the short ceiling that had two little red flags trembling on its breeze. “The HVAC system draws blocks away from here, so there’s no worry of a contamination. There’s also a tunnel out and a radio-wave transmitter that will scramble our voices if we’re being recorded.”

The tunnel was a news flash and Grier looked around. As far as she could tell, all the shelving was bolted in and the floor was solid stone, but given the other little tricks in the house, she couldn’t say she was surprised.

Isaac spoke up. “If I was to go to someone and talk, who would it be?”

“That depends on how—”

“What about Mother.” As Grier cut in, cut off, derailed, she stared at her father’s face, looking for subtle twitches around his eyes and mouth. “What about when she died. Was that really cancer?”

Although it had been seven years ago, those horrible final days were still so vivid and she sifted through them, looking for cracks in the walls of the events, searching for places where things that seemed one way were really another.

“Yes,” her father said. “Yes . . . she . . . Yes, that was the cancer. I swear.”

Grier exhaled and found it hard to imagine that she was actually relieved by that dreadful disease. But far better for Mother Nature to have been the culprit. Far better that that tragedy didn’t need rewriting. One was more than enough.

She cleared her throat. Nodded. “Okay, then. Okay.”

A warm palm covered her own and squeezed. As her father’s hands were both on the table, she realized it was Isaac. When she looked over at him, he broke the connection, his touch lingering just long enough so that she knew he was with her, but not so much that she felt restrained.

God, the contradiction of him. Brutal. Sexual. Protective.

With a mental slap, she refocused on her father. “You were in the middle of saying something?”