“Are you going to be okay at home with Owen being all riled up? You know the plan still stands—la mia casa è la tua casa. I know how he gets when he’s angry.”

“I’m fine, Lily, really. I just need a bubble bath, a glass of wine, and a book. By the end of the weekend things should hopefully calm down.”

By this point I found my car, digging my keys out of my pocket.

I hadn’t noticed it until a sliver of light glinted on my tire, catching my attention.

“Oh my God,” I said, forgetting I was on the phone.

“Lily? Is everything all right?”

“No. Someone slashed all my tires.”

I could have shrugged it off as mischief-making teenagers, except for the handle of a blade jutting out of the front driver’s side tire. A message—and a creepy one at that. Was this saying I was next? The worst part was that it could have been any number of enemies I had recently made. Irving? Willow? The mysterious phone breather?

The mistake underpinning all of my others: making enemies out of friends.

Chapter 26

Mackenzie

FRIDAY NIGHT

They say love and hate go hand in hand. They’re right, you know. In this world there is nothing as inspiring as love. The poetry it has created, the artwork it has motivated. But if a husband stole it away and replaced it with apathy, there is nothing as vindictive as a wife’s hate.

I heard the front door slam shut. Not the gentle, calm click of the latch returning home, but a brash, irritated bang. The master was home, and surprise surprise, he was in a bad mood. When Owen had a rough day at work, the whole neighborhood knew it. He made sure of that with his speed-driving and slamming the front door off its hinges. What they didn’t know was what he did behind closed bedroom doors, safe from Aria’s view but not safe for me.

“With your disfigurement you should be happy I like screwing you,” he’d tell me when I made excuses for why I wasn’t in the mood. Not like my mood mattered. He always got what he wanted, when he wanted it. My disfigurement, as he put it, always kept me in the passenger’s seat. I would never be the driver of my life, because I wasn’t pretty enough.

Owen stormed past me into the kitchen, where he threw open the fridge door and grabbed a beer.

“You okay, honey?” I called from the living room where I was folding laundry.