The second-story condo she couldn’t afford to keep much longer was part of a five-unit brownstone in the city’s Andersonville neighborhood and boasted its own private parking space. As she slung her bag into her car along with her travel mug and the cold pizza slice, she wondered whether she’d be in jail by the end of the day. It was a risk she had to take.

Graham occupied the top two floors of a converted, four-story former seminary on a tree-lined street in Lakeview. Lakeview wasn’t Chicago’s most expensive neighborhood, but it was one of its best with great shops, trendy restaurants, a stretch of shoreline, and Wrigley Field. She wedged her Sonata into a semi-parking spot across from a postage-stamp park and took a few bites of the pizza and a swig of coffee. Her days of treating herself to a morning Starbucks were gone.

She tugged on a blade of her real hair—short, choppy, the same chestnut brown Duke said her mother’s had been, before she’d been murdered in a sidewalk robbery. Piper was four at the time and barely remembered her, but the effect of her mother’s violent death had set the course of Piper’s upbringing.

Duke had raised Piper to be tough. He’d enrolled her in one self-defense class after another, along with teaching her every trick he’d picked up over the years. He’d taught her to be strong, and even when she was very young, he’d freeze her out if she cried. He’d rewarded her toughness by teaching her to shoot and taking her to ball games, by letting her go with him on trips to the corner bar and laughing when she cussed. But no tears. No whining. And no visits to play at a friend’s house until he’d run a background check.

That was the bewildering, contradictory part of her upbringing. At the same time he demanded strength from her, he was also maddeningly overprotective—a constant source of conflict between them as she’d grown older and he’d planted himself firmly between her and her ambitions. He’d raised her to be as tough as he was and then tried to wrap her in cotton.

She wadded up the rest of her pizza and shoved it in the overstuffed litterbag hanging from her dashboard. She’d begged Duke to let her join him, but he’d refused.

“This business is too dirty for a woman. I didn’t spend a fortune on your education to see you staked out in a car photographing some asshole cheating on his wife.”