It amazed her that dancers were on stage at noon on a Monday, but it was Bourbon Street, after all. Bars were advertising three for one, and karaoke was going. “No, thanks.” Though she couldn’t prevent herself from glancing in the open door. All she could see was a dark hallway, and a woman’s legs on the stage.

And she suddenly had the feeling that someone was watching her. From inside the club.

Sara shivered, rubbing her hands over her arms. Maybe the customer the doorman had referred to was still checking her out. Which she didn’t like at all.

“Well, have a good afternoon then, and if you change your mind, stop on back.” The guy waved and diverted his attention to two men passing by on the street.

Giving one last backward glance into the club and seeing nothing noteworthy, Sara started down the street, returning the way she had come. She wanted to go back to Gabriel’s apartment, to the security of his courtyard. Finding pieces of her mother’s motivation on Bourbon Street wasn’t going to happen. She had to accept she was never going to have answers to those questions. Hell, maybe she wouldn’t want them if she did have them. Ultimately, she and her mother had been diametrically opposed to each other in the core of who they were.

Funny that she had never given much thought to her biological father. It would seem logical that if she were nothing like her mother, she must be like her father, yet she had never been interested in finding him. Only once had she asked for his name, and her mother had told her she didn’t remember his last name, only his first, which had been Brian. The last name "started with an S” but beyond that her mother couldn’t recall. Sara had never asked again. Who Brian S. had been and why he had been a bouncer and what he had seen in her sixteen-year-old mother had never really mattered to her.

Maybe because it was her mother who had driven her life, not him. It was her mother who had raised her, her mother who hugged her and yelled at her, who had vacillated between effusive affection and stone-cold remoteness. Her mother had influenced her psyche on every level, and now she was left alone to deal with the mess of her life.

It made her angry. At her mother. At the world.