I made a pot of tea in the kitchen. We sat at my kitchen table with MINE scratched on it and drank one cup each, before Roman couldn’t stand it any longer and bailed.

The second he was out the door, I grabbed my phone and dialed Raphael’s number.

“Hey, babycakes,” he said into the phone.

Babycakes? Babycakes! “You want to act psycho? You haven’t seen psycho yet.”

“I’m not worried,” he said. “To go psycho, you’d have to pull that stick out of your ass and we both know that won’t be happening.”

I unclenched my teeth. “You will regret this.”

“Love you, babe.”

The plastic receiver crunched in my hand and the phone went dead. I looked at it. Crushed electronic guts peeked out through the gaps in the broken plastic. I dropped the mangled wreck of the phone on my table and went into the bathroom.

A razor and shaving cream rested on the sink next to my lotion. A second toothbrush greeted me, a twin to mine, except mine was green and this one was blue. He had invaded my territory. He had put his stuff into it. He, he, he…Aaaaargh! He’d made my place smell like him!

I grabbed the toothbrush. I wanted to break it into tiny pieces and then feed it into the garbage disposal.

No. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. I wouldn’t gather all of his things into a large metal trash can, I wouldn’t pour gasoline on it, and I wouldn’t set it on fire. No, nothing so pedestrian.

This, this deserved a special retaliation.

I would have to think of something. Oh yes. He would regret this. He would wish he’d gotten run over by a PAD tank instead.

CHAPTER 11

I woke up early and lay in bed for a few minutes, looking at the ceiling, before my brain finally registered that there was a new chandelier on it. I must not have noticed it last night, when I finally fell into bed, exhausted and enraged. A glossy silver disk of about eighteen inches in diameter was attached directly to the ceiling. Long wavy crystal leaves patterned with ribs of varying textures cascaded from it, suspended by chains hidden within crystal beads. Thin tendrils of crystal, like the curved shoots of a grape vine, hung between the leaves, translucent with light, and between them, on longer gleaming chains, textured crystal spheres, frosted with silver, clinked gently in the light breeze from the open windows. It was beautifully romantic, yet modern, a kind of chandelier a twenty-first-century mermaid might have in her underwater cave or an Ice Queen from an Andersen fairy tale might hang in her palace of ice.