“I just wanted to thank you for Darin. We’ve been together for so long. I just don’t know what I would do without him.” She stepped toward me and hugged me.

Oh my God, what do I do?

I hugged her back, as gently as I could, with one arm.

“You take care now,” Mrs. Haffey said, smiled, and went downstairs.

She’d hugged my furry, smelly, bloodstained self. She had no idea, but I would run back into that basement and fight off a hundred of those bugs just because she hadn’t screamed when she’d seen me.

I needed to get inside and change into my human shape, pronto. Before any neighbors decided to call the cops because there was a monster breaking into that “nice Texas girl’s” apartment.

I gripped the handle of my door. It turned in my hand, but my brain didn’t process it right away and I slammed my shoulder into it. The door flew open with a thunderous thump and I rolled into the apartment, springing into a crouch.

My apartment smelled of Raphael. If he was still here, there was no way he wouldn’t have heard me.

I kicked the door shut, snarled a little to let him know I meant business, and set out to search. A quick glance told me that my living room was Raphael-free. My bedroom was also empty, and so was my closet. I made a full circle, came to the kitchen, and stopped. My nylon mesh backpack sat in the middle of my kitchen table, with my dress and shoes still in it. My tablecloth was missing in action and long, jagged scratches covered the table’s surface. The scratches looked suspiciously like letters.

I climbed on a chair and looked at it from above.

MINE.

Oh, that’s great. Fantastic. So mature. Perhaps he would pull my pigtails next or stick a tack on my seat.

I shoved the table. Who did he think he was, breaking into my apartment and vandalizing my furniture? I had never done that to him. I had never ruined any of his things.

I went to shower and scrubbed myself clean.

I mean, what the hell was I even supposed to do with this MINE thing? One moment he was shoving another woman under my nose, the next he’d decided we were back on and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting with the program. An old song surfaced in my memories. Love is all you need. Maybe, but in real life love was rarely all you got. Raphael and I also had pride, and guilt, and anger, jealousy and hurt feelings, and all of it was mixed into this giant Gordian knot. Untangling it seemed impossible.