Doing it now, he wrote and ambled into the kitchen, where the remains of the dinner he’d made were waiting for him. He was tempted to clean it up first but made himself take a stool at the gigantic marble island and scroll through his phone to find his mother-in-law’s contact information.

Hey. I’m in town to do some fundraising for an arts center at New Horizons and would love to see you and Graham while I’m here. Let me know if you have time.

He saw the three dots that signified she was reading his text and responding, but he waited several minutes, and her response never came.

Muttering a curse, he rested his head in his hands while imagining Shiloh in the room with him. “Well, babe, I might’ve pissed them off again.” He knew it was crazy to talk to his wife as though she was still alive, but she was such a part of him that even after three years, it was almost impossible to accept that she was gone.

A few minutes later, he checked his phone again.

Nothing.

Fortunately, when Tia went over to spend time with Kiki two hours after her yelling match with Seth, she didn’t run into him. She could see that the lights were on upstairs, so she assumed he was up. But she figured he was deeply immersed in his work, because she never heard from him while she played with Maxi’s parrot. Classical music came through a stereo system that filled the house, which was more soothing than she would’ve expected, and after the first hour, she began to relax and feel as though the soul-crushing events of the past month weren’t pressing in on her quite so insistently.

Being inside the protective walls of the aviary, enjoying such an incredible creature, proved to be a nice reprieve. One she desperately needed. She hesitated to give Seth the credit for this improvement, but she suspected he deserved at least some of it. The constant vigilance and care it required to hide her face had been a bigger deal than she was willing to admit. Now that he’d seen her, she could release that, and they could go on about their business, as he’d suggested, without worrying about it.

For the first time in a long while, she could breathe without experiencing such a terrible tightness in her chest.

Of course, it wasn’t only being able to forget about the bandages. His reaction to her scars had helped, too. He hadn’t recoiled in shock or horror. He’d shrugged. That was it. He seemed to possess a certain depth of understanding that made her trust him. No matter what he did—and he’d definitely surprised her once or twice already—she believed he wouldn’t purposely hurt her, wouldn’t sell her out to the press or anything like that.