“Nair was awful,” she said. “Everyone knows he’s awful. But now he’s dead and I’m just supposed to go to the grocery store and go home and make dinner and that’s it?” She shook her head in his hands. “A man is dead.”

“Livvie—”

She lifted her hands too, curling them tight around either side of his neck.

“I don’t want this to be my life,” she whispered fiercely. “But now, I don’t want it in your life. Don’t you see? Don’t you see now why I can’t do this? Why I can’t have you? Why I can’t have anybody?”

Before he could react to that, as in put a stop to where she was heading, she let him go, pulled out of his hold, jumping off the stool and taking a big step away. Throwing an arm out wide to take in his kitchen, she kept talking.

“Honey, I’m home,” she called out sarcastically. “Oh good, sweetheart. Taco extravaganza for dinner and, oh, by the way, this afternoon, Dad murdered someone in front of me.”

“Liv—”

She bent toward him, the movement so abrupt it appeared painful.

“That’s insane,” she hissed.

“Baby—”

She leaned back. “And what do you do? You can’t call the cops. Or you can. Then, as retribution, my dad makes you dead or I’m dead or your brother’s dead or the mother of his children is dead or—”

He took two strides to her, yanked her in his arms and ordered, “Livvie, stop.”

She held herself stiff then sagged so deep he had to take most of her weight.

“We can’t do this,” she said into his chest.

“I’m getting you out,” he declared.

She went stiff again.

Then her head jerked back and she asked, “What?”

“I’m getting you out.”

“Nicky,” she whispered, her hands coming up, going into his jacket and curling into his shirt at the sides of his waist.

She did that but said no more.

His family called him Nicky when he was a kid. He loved it until it was the time in a boy’s life to hate it. No one had used that name for years. Decades.

He loved it again from Olivia.