'Don't worry about it. School starts soon. Besides…'

'Besides what?'

'I never thought I'd say this, but, well… I love it.' He looked away with uncharacteristic embarrassment. 'I mean, I love them. I never saw myself as the paternal type, you know, what with dressing up like a girl and all, but…'

He looked at Thomas apologetically. Sometimes it seemed Mia was always apologizing.

'They get under your skin,' Thomas said.

'They get under your skin.'

Thomas held up his beer. 'Here's to them,' he declared softly, nodding to the shadowy pup-tent.

The clink of bottles warmed the night.

After Mia left, Thomas set his air mattress and sleeping bag across the patio. He'd agreed to let the kids camp out only after crumbling under relentless pressure. He sure as hell wasn't about to leave them alone, even if the FBI thought that Neil had relocated to the Gulf Coast. Besides, it had been a long, long time since he had last slept beneath the stars. And he rather liked the idea of standing guard over his children.

He kicked off his shoes, then crawled in, jeans, shirt, and all. He huddled to conserve warmth, stared at the great bowl of the night sky. Things seemed clear enough, the black gaping between pinpoints of white, so much so it was hard to believe they were abandoning all the earth-based telescopes because of the way jet exhausts hazed the upper atmosphere. There seemed to be plenty of stars.

He stared and breathed. But no matter how deep he peered into the cavernous light years, the sense of awe he was searching for eluded him. Instead, all the lunatic images from the previous week crowded through the turnstile of his mind's eye. Glimpses of Cynthia Powski blurred into images of the widowed Cream writhing about the porn minister's cock. Fingertips pinching nipples. Glass unzipping skin. On and on, no matter how hard he blinked.

Abyss upon abyss. The psychological spread across the cosmological.

He groaned aloud, rubbed his face furiously. What was his problem?

The easy answer was that he was suffering from some kind of mild post-traumatic disorder. The brain actually possessed two ways of laying down long-term memories: a high-resolution, detail-intensive path processed through the cortex, and a low-resolution, emotion-intensive path processed through the amygdala. Traumatic events usually produced memories of the second variety: it was one of the brain's rapid-response mechanisms. The problem was that the system could be easily fooled, generating intense emotional reactions in harmless situations—which was why so many Iraq War veterans heard gunfire instead of firecrackers, car bombs instead of thunder. For the sake of reaction time, their brains simply weren't taking any chances.

But then why was it Cynthia Powski who haunted him in the small moments of his day, and not the horror of Peter Halasz chewing a little girl to the core?

Was it simply because she was a porn star?