Pari spun around, and Shaw stuck his fingers into his mouth.

“Your junk,” Pari said.

He tugged on the sweatshirt.

“Do you want to learn how to take cheap flights for free? There’s a 900 number they want you to call. Should I have written it down? Is that my job too, to take down numbers, to give you messages? Is that another important task that you came down here to supervise?”

“Actually, we did buy you that message book—”

“Oh, so I should be grateful? Is that it? I should be on my hands and knees, kissing your feet because you bought me a message book.” She grabbed a pad of paper and held it in the air.

“That’s the extra stationery the gynecologist gave us.” Shaw pointed. “That’s the message book. The one with the carbon copy paper in case you lose—”

Pari was making that low rumble again.

“You know what? We’ll cover that another time. I’m just going to head back upstairs.”

In his bedroom, Shaw tried to settle back into the easy, relaxed trance that he had enjoyed earlier, but it was gone. The possibility of North calling, the possibility of figuring things out, had chewed a hole inside him, and no matter how Shaw shifted and stretched and closed his eyes and tried to relax, that hole was still there, the aching sense of something missing.

Before he even knew what he was doing, he was checking the nightstand, checking under the pillow, checking the dresser, checking behind the mirror. No sign of his phone. He followed the hallway, where Matty was singing Madonna—not, thank Christ, “Like a Virgin,”—and steam billowed up from behind the curtain. He checked the living room: the coffee table, under the couch, the chair he had sat in last night. It wasn’t until he removed the couch cushions that he found it, and that just showed how crazy last night had gotten—Shaw didn’t even remember sitting on the couch. The night with Matty, the things Matty had done—the things he had taught Shaw to do—had pretty much scorched everything else about last night from Shaw’s memory.

Shaw froze as he unlocked the screen.

He had a message.

His heart thrummed like a too-tight wire.

From North?

Jesus, if it was from North, if they could put all this behind them today, if North said he was sorry, if Shaw shrugged and said he’d need a little time, but if they could get that far, if they could get far enough that Shaw could say something like But you need to understand that Matty is part of my life now, and he’s important to me, if they could get to the part where North exploded again—because he was North, and he’d try to play it cool and end up exploding—and Shaw could calmly, rationally say, Yes, we talked all about it. He told me everything; he didn’t even try to deny it, and if you’d just give him a chance—