Aldo jogged up the stone steps to the front porch of his Craftsman bungalow and pulled open the screen door. Sweaty, thirsty, and now more hopeful than he had been, he loped down the hallway to the kitchen in the back. He filled a glass straight from the tap, grabbed a beer from the fridge, and returned to the porch. Dropping down onto a chair that wouldn’t disintegrate under his sweat, he propped his feet up on the railing.

He thought of Luke and the rumors that his recluse of an almost-brother was shacking up with a stranger. The stranger who played a role in taking down Gloria’s abusive asshole. He needed to touch base, catch up. Find out if Luke had suffered a head trauma and invited a psychotic woman into his home. Or if some miracle had occurred and his friend was finally loosening his grip on grief.

He had let his own life shit take the lead this week. It was time to check back in.

The neighborhood noise buzzed quietly around him. Pauletta’s lawnmower coughing to life. Roberta Shawn’s kids begging for popsicles.

He’d bought the house two years ago and, unlike his frozen-in-time friend Luke, had immediately started renovating. He had tweaked and painted and reconfigured until the four-bedroom house was ready. He believed. Aldo Moretta was putting it out there to the universe. He believed.

He was ready for the rest of his life to begin. He wanted the wife, the family, the backyard barbecues. He wanted neighbor kids playing capture the flag in his backyard. And he wanted every last one of those things with Gloria Parker.

4

“Mama, I’m going…out.” Gloria called, studying herself in the reflection of the mirror propped against the wall in her childhood bedroom. The walls were still the same aqua that she’d enthusiastically slathered all over the room for her fourteenth birthday. Her bold fuchsia and raspberry accessories were still scattered about. Echoes of a different girl. Brave, vibrant, goofy, unbelievably naïve.

She didn’t recognize any traces of that girl inside or out as she adjusted the cheery floral scarf around her neck. It added a little something to her plain t-shirt and jeans while camouflaging the gruesome bruises that had faded to a lovely jaundice color around her neck. “I shouldn’t be gone longer than an hour.”

Her mother, slim and sad, appeared in her open doorway.

“You know you don’t have to report to me,” Sara reminded her.

She dropped her gaze to the pink toenails on display in her flip-flops. Her mother had treated her to a pedicure—and a cell phone—as soon as she was well enough to leave the house. Gloria had spent the entire time shoving away the feelings of guilt and fear that swept over her.

“I know,” she said sadly. “It’s going to take some time.”