Mary closed her apartment door behind her and locked it. All the lights in her apartment were still off, which always made Mary feel like she’d just walked into an exhibit in a museum that had closed for the evening. Behold: the life of Mary Trace. She viewed the lumpy shapes of her furniture, the blank geometric grace of the rugs on her floor, the frames on her walls. And then, across the way, the shadowed, ghostly version of herself in the hall mirror.

She ached for Cora.

I was expecting someone younger, the disdainful voice said again, popping up out of nowhere, threading in with her mother’s voice. How many times had her mother warned her that she was rapidly approaching an age when men would, in fact, wish she were younger? A hundred? A thousand?

“What an ass,” Mary huffed and flipped on the lights, tossing her home into bright, sharp focus. He was an ass who didn’t deserve her. An ass who’d sneered at all the years she’d lost just trying to say goodbye to the friend she couldn’t call tonight.

“TOUGH LOSS THIS MORNING, Whitford.”

John’s shoulders tightened as if his muscles were connected by a string that had just gotten half a foot shorter. He swiveled in his creaky chair, careful not to bash his knees on the filing cabinet he basically had to sit on top of to make room in his tiny office. And there was Crash Willis, leaning in his doorway, smirking like the royal asshole he was.

Willis was an assistant district attorney and John’s least favorite person in the borough of Brooklyn. Even within the confines of his own mind, John refused to refer to him as Crash. What kind of parents named their kid Crash, for God’s sake? Rich parents, apparently.

John let his eyes trace Willis from the top of his blond head to the tips of his teal leather loafers. Everything from the two-hundred-dollar haircut to the matching teal pocket square in the breast pocket of his suit screamed money. No one invested in teal loafers unless they had at least five other pairs of work shoes already.

“Wouldn’t count it as a loss yet,” John said, stretching his legs out and crossing them at the ankles, just because he knew his nonchalance would piss Willis off.

“Your girl gets indicted on all counts? Pretty big hit to the game plan, pal.”