Clouds of doubt passed across her features. Junie was a little older than Toys but normally exuded youthful energy and strength. Anyone who didn’t know her and didn’t look too closely merely saw a woman with masses of wavy blond hair, sky-blue eyes, and a wholesome smile that was so infectious it made other people smile without knowing why or even being aware they were doing it. But when they looked closely, they saw small lines of care around her mouth and at the corners of her eyes. Lines that may have been born as laugh lines but that had been deepened by stress, awareness, and pain. Life had been unkind to Junie in ways none of the other employees at FreeTech knew about. Toys did, because they were friends on that special level where there are no secrets.

Just as Junie knew about Toys and his very checkered past.

Their life paths had made them freakish by any normal standards, but there was a bonding in that. They both were from what Junie’s lover, Joe Ledger, called the storm lands. It gave the refugees from life’s more troubled places a shared understanding that ran deeper than mere empathy. It taught them a language that often did not require words and whose aspects seldom had appropriate adjectives.

“What’s going on with you?” he asked. His accent, though refined by education and world travel, easily echoed the Essex town of Purfleet, where he’d grown up hard in a bad neighborhood and a worse home. This was long before the local government changed it to the more upscale-sounding Purfleet-on-Thames as part of an intended gentrification. “Since when do you get the vapors, you silly cow?”

“It wasn’t that,” she began, but paused. “I … I…”

“Finish a sentence for me. There’s a good lass.”

Junie pushed herself up to a sitting position while Toys watched, studying her eyes and complexion to look for a drop in blood pressure. She seemed fine, though, if a bit pale.

“It was so weird,” she said. “I mean … I never faint.”

“Because you’re not an ingénue from a Victorian drawing room novel,” he said. “So why did you faint? You feeling sick?”

“No, it’s not that.”

“Then what?” asked Toys.

“I … I think it was Joe.”

Toys made a moue of disapproval. “What about him?”

Junie rubbed her face with her hands and looked around the room as if she’d never seen it before. When she looked back at Toys, he saw tears glittering like small diamonds in the corners of her eyes. They broke and fell down her cheeks. The sight touched him, softening his natural antagonism every time Ledger’s name was mentioned. The dislike they shared of each other was rooted in just cause and had memories of hurt and harm heaped over it.

He waited for Junie to find the words to say what disturbed her so deeply.