Not really. Every day had been a gaping, long, endless fight for her sanity. But it was the socially correct response. Defuse the situation. She certainly knew how to do that. She’d spent her entire life walking on proverbial eggshells with her mother, tamping down the explosions before they could start.

Gabriel didn’t seem to like what he was reading. His jaw clenched and he didn’t look up from the paper. “I’m not ready for you today.”

Sara stifled a sigh, pulling off her sunglasses. She hadn’t expected a diva. From his e-mails Gabriel St. John had seemed like an efficient, clinical crime writer. Exactly what she wanted. Zero emotion. Yet he was scowling at her for no apparent reason whatsoever other than that he couldn’t look at the calendar or enter appointments into his computer correctly.

“Since I drove in from Kenner, got lost downtown after getting off on the wrong exit, and circled the block six times for a parking spot, could we just have a brief preliminary meeting to discuss the project? I can come back tomorrow, but I’d really like to talk today.” Outline and clearly communicate your needs. That’s what they had told her in rehab. She had to stop expecting people to satisfy her wants without ever cluing anyone in to what they were.

“Are you staying in Kenner?” He frowned. “That’s going to be inconvenient. I’d thought you’d stay in the Quarter or downtown. Why Kenner?”

Because it was an innocuous suburb where the airport was, and it made her feel safer. She had been raised in Florida, in the land of the new and tidy, where the chain restaurant ruled. New Orleans scared her. Her mother had despised this city, had never returned once she’d left, and Sara herself was a little intimidated, unnerved by the shabby buildings of the Quarter, the disintegrating sidewalks, and the barrage of odors. Kenner was definitely safer to her mental health.

Gabriel watched the emotions play over Sara Michaels’s face with curiosity. She was not at all what he had expected. Her contact with him had been efficient, brisk, and unemotional, like the scientist that she was. Yet the woman in front of him was a riot of emotions—they played over her face, haunted her eyes, settled into the rigidity of her shoulders. Petite and blond, wearing a billowing pale blue sundress that stopped above her knees, she looked fragile, beaten, like the only thing keeping her from collapsing on the sidewalk was the pure strength of her will.

“The rent was cheaper,” she said.