Honestly, this laconic thing could drive a person crazy! “I like you,” I admitted. “I can’t help it, Cody. I’ve liked you since I was ten years old and Freddie Cooper tried to pull my pants down on the bus to see if it was true that I had a tail. You told him to stop, and when he wouldn’t, you punched him in the head. Remember?”

His eyes crinkled. “Uh-huh.”

“So . . .” I gestured helplessly.

“Daisy.” Cody reached across the booth, capturing and stilling my hands. “That was a long time ago. You know enough to understand why it wouldn’t work now.”

“Time is relative,” I murmured, trying not to feel hurt. “Rather like age.”

“What?”

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

He squeezed my hands, and let them go. “Let’s talk about something else. Tell me . . .” He hesitated, searching for a safe topic. “Okay, tell me this. Daisy? What the, um, hell kind of name is that for a hell-spawn? Where did that come from?” Despite everything, I laughed. “I’m serious!” he insisted. “You can’t tell me it isn’t a little odd.”

The waitress drifted over to our table, bringing glasses of water. Cody ordered ribs again. I ordered the spaghetti-and-meatball special.

“It’s from a book,” I said. “My name, I mean.”

Cody looked perplexed. “If it’s The Great Gatsby, we read it in Mr. Leary’s class, and no offense, but I don’t get it.”

I sighed. “Not Daisy Buchanan. Princess Daisy.” Cody looked blank. “It’s the title of a romance novel. A big, sprawling one with dethroned royalty and secret twins and incestuous half brothers.”

“Still not getting it,” he commented. “Possibly more than ever.”

“Not a lot to get. It was guilty pleasure reading for my mom and my grandma back in the day, long before I happened. That was one of their favorites.” I tugged on a lock of my pale Scandinavian hair. “It has a blond-haired, dark-eyed heroine, okay? And a happy ending. My mom’s a big believer in happy endings.”

“Ah.” Cody’s expression changed. “That must take a special kind of strength.”

“Yeah.” I drew a line through the condensation on my water glass with one fingertip. “She was nineteen when Belphegor knocked her up,” I said without looking at Cody. “A freshman in college, the first person in her family to go. One of her roommates’ parents rented a cottage in Pemkowet over spring break. The girls thought it would be fun to use a Ouija board. No one knew enough to warn them. At three o’clock in the morning, they found Mom levitating several feet above the bed in the act of, um, congress with a shadowy figure with glowing eyes, bat wings, and a tail.”

“Yeah, I heard.” His voice was low. “She told you herself?”