Pretty in Pink. Breakfast Club. Sixteen Candles. Die Hard. Under Siege.

Even he knew these.

“That’s my nighttime viewing,” Grier said, as she came across and straightened the thin boxes even though they were perfectly straight.

“Different from what you have downstairs.” And he found it hard to believe she was a poser who wanted to be all Jane Austen in public and Jerry Seinfeld here in her room.

She picked up When Harry Met Sally . . . and smoothed her hand over the autumn scene on the front. “I don’t sleep well and these help. It’s like . . . my brain goes back to the time when they came out. I see the cars . . . the supermarket scenes with cheaper prices . . . the clothes that used to be in style . . . hair that no one wears anymore. I go back to when I was the age I first saw them, back to when things were . . . simpler.” She laughed in an awkward rush. “Cinematic knockout drops, I’d guess you’d call it. It’s the only thing that works for me.”

Staring at her as she looked at Meg Ryan, he had such an image of her curled on her side, the blue flicker of the screen playing across her features, the trip into the past calming her nerves and slowing her brain down.

Did she have a lover to watch with her? he wondered. A boyfriend?

No ring, so he assumed she wasn’t married or engaged.

“What,” she said, tugging at her beautiful black dress. He cleared his throat, hating that he’d been caught staring. “Which shower do you want me to use.”

That made her smile. For the first time.

And yeah, sap that he was . . . his breath caught and his heart stopped.

Grier put the movie back in its slot. “More food first,” she said as she turned and led the way back downstairs.

Jim and his boys landed in the rear garden of a three-story brick house that both screamed old money and apologized for making any fuss at the same time. Everything about it, and its neighborhood, was refined and super-well cared for . . . and brick. For God’s sake, the whole zip code looked like the three little pigs had gone hog wild: brick houses, brick walls, brick walkways, brick lanes.

It was enough to make the Big Bad Wolf go iron lung.

Through plate-glass windows, a kitchen that was pretty damn spank spread out in all kinds of directions, and there was some kind of food thing going on at the counter—but no people. Stepping back, Jim looked not at the house, but through the house, closing his eyes and concentrating.

Yes, he could sense the pair of them . . . as well as something else. There was a . . . ripple . . . inside.