“Congratulations, by the way,” I say. “How far along are you?”

She nearly chokes on her tea, her eyes wide with surprise.

“Only six weeks. How did you know?”

I tilt my head and smile enigmatically. “I just do.” Because Peggy Fortune is the Gossip Queen.

The sniffling starts again. “I just need some advice. You may have heard through the grapevine that Duke and I are having difficulties.”

The sniffling morphs into streaming tears, and the green shards in her aura crash and compact. Becky chases the tears with a precisely angled tissue corner, as they sneak past the thick rims of her glasses and onto her cheeks.

“Yeah well, he’s a —” I stop short. Because she already looks damaged enough. “So where’d you hear that I can see things?” I ask.

“The Fortunes have . . . ways,” she murmurs. “Everybody knows that.”

“Well, it was news to me. Seriously. Who told you?”

“Char told William, and William told me.”

“Gimp?”

“I don’t call him that, it’s insulting.” She stiffens and shifts. “Look, I know you and Duke have some history. And I know I don’t really deserve your help after what I did.” Becky’s voice drops to a whisper, as she rolls the tip of her Kleenex between her trembling, fidgeting fingers.

It is hard to be gleeful when you can see another person’s pain so vividly. Even if that person is Becky Chickenshit.

“That crap in high school with the picture in the slideshow?” I say, as if I haven’t held the sting of the whole thing in my heart and mind for twenty years. “Duke used you to get at me. It wasn’t your fault, he was popular and you were . . . you. We’re adults now. Water under the bridge, Becky.”

I reach out to touch her hand, expecting to see a whole new spectrum of gratitude and relief blooming above her head at being forgiven. Instead, I get an eyeful of dirty brown guilt, accented with bottomless puddles of a deep, dark blue. But then I see something that makes me panic a little. A misshapen blackened red hole, like a burning garbage bag, creeps into Becky’s colours. There’s a greasy, sick sort of deterioration happening on the edge of her emotional orbit that I can only perceive in the peripheral vision of my left eye. I try to blink it away. And fail. My stomach churns.

“You don’t know what actually happened, do you?” her words jolt me out of my uneasy fixation.

All through high school, Becky Chickenshit and Willy Gimp were close friends. All through high school, Becky wished that she and Willy could be more than friends. And all through high school, Willy confided in Becky about his feelings for me. So every time I’d be out chasing the arse off Weasel Tobin, then sneaking back to Willy Gimp when I got hurt, Becky Chickenshit knew. Every time I acted like he was invisible at school, only to go looking for him when I needed a shoulder to cry on, Becky knew. And every time I crowed indiscreetly about my nameless “friend with benefits,” Becky knew.