“This damned thing—” the kid said.

“Tony!” Rebecca said sharply. “Enough.”

The boy went immediately into pout mode, turning his back on his mother and shaking the remote as if he could somehow make the bad connections spark.

Bentz walked out and squinted into the white haze. For the next week, at least, he was a resident of Southern California.

Hayes strode across the lush lawn in front of his ex-wife’s apartment as the sun settled over the hills to the west. He clicked the remote lock for his SUV and nearly ran into a woman walking two beagles who tugged their leashes taut. “Hey, watch it,” she said, sending him a withering glare. He barely noticed as he yanked open the driver’s door.

The interior of his car was blistering, the steering wheel almost too hot to touch. But the temperature inside his 4Runner was nothing compared to the heat churning in his gut. Jesus, he was mad. Who the hell did Delilah think she was, pulling out of the marriage because she couldn’t hack being married to a cop any longer? She’d known he was a career man with the LAPD when she’d married him twelve years ago.

But then she’d been pregnant.

And they’d both wanted the kid.

That part, he thought, considering his daughter, they’d gotten right. The rest had been up and down, a roller-coaster ride exacerbated by his career and Delilah’s mood swings.

So now they were divorced. Shit. Making him a two-time loser. He’d already been married once before to Alonda, his college sweet heart. That had ended when he’d found her in bed with her best friend and she’d admitted to him that she was gay. Had been all along. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, but…

Great.

He’d stormed out and filed papers the next day. At least there were no kids from that first doomed union.

Two years later he’d met Delilah and fallen head over heels. But he’d been careful. He hadn’t wanted to make the same mistake twice. He hazarded another glance at the apartment building, a four-story pink-tinged stucco building with arched windows and tile roof, a nod to old California. She was on the top floor, two bedrooms and a thousand square feet of vaulted ceilings and new carpeting. There, she asserted, she could “start over” and “find what she really wanted in life,” whatever the hell that meant.

With a flick of the ignition his Toyota fired up. He pulled out of his parking spot, a rare commodity here in Santa Monica, twenty-six blocks from the beach. High rent, in Hayes’s estimation, but Delilah had money. She owned half of a modeling school, where runway moms sent their daughters to learn the tricks of the trade. Delilah, once a print-ad model herself and a natural salesperson, had helped make the school a raging success.