Madison’s posture goes ramrod straight, mouth agape. “My brother! He gave one to me and the other to my sister, before he—”

“He’s out of the country?” Sylvie asks.

“Yes.”

She taps her lips with the tip of an index finger. “You’re worried about him.”

“Yeah. He’s a contractor for the US government, in Iraq.”

Sylvie nods then asks, “Has your dad passed?”

“Yes,” Madison says, “when we were little. I don’t really remember him. But my—”

“Your mom is still alive?”

Madison bobs up and down on the balls of her feet, face flushed. “She is!”

“Your brother, he’s more of a father figure?”

“He helped raise us.”

Sylvie tugs at her earlobe like she can’t quite hear. “Does his first name start with a B or R—”

“Brian! And his middle name is Robert. This is unreal! Brian went into the military at eighteen so he could make money to help Mom with Becca and me. He wanted us to attend Saint Mary’s—it’s an all-girls’ high school. Is Brian . . . is he going to be okay? Over there?”

“Know that Brian is at peace with the choices he made,” Sylvie replies. “He loved you, and given another chance, he wouldn’t have done anything differently.”

“Thank. You. So. So. Much,” Madison gushes.

We head across a stylish lobby dotted with wing-backed leather chairs and clashing patterns in bright colors that somehow form a cohesive, hip vibe. When the silver elevator doors close, Sylvie murmurs, “Something happened to her brother. There was a really loud noise, maybe an explosion, and—”

“Skip the theatrics, okay?” I mutter. “They won’t sway me.”

Sylvie flinches. “What? Are you mad at me?”

Instantly, I feel like a jerk, which makes me angrier. I’m mad at my knee-jerk desire to help you; that I registered the swell of your hip beneath my hand; liked that I was the man next to you while the other people in the lobby could only look; I’m pissed that you just fed a load of BS to a young woman who’s got a damn good reason to be worried about her brother’s safety.

“Say it,” Sylvie demands.

Anger scrapes inside my chest like flint to steel. “You just can’t resist, can you?” I accuse. “I sense two figures? Madison had already said she had a sister. She intimated that her brother had left before you followed a natural progression. Even I knew, by the look on that girl’s face, that she was worried about him, that he’s a father figure. Does his name begin with a B or an R? Popular initial for a guy’s name—you had a good chance with one, got lucky with two. Basically you played the odds, threw logical assumptions out, took off with whatever hit. That girl is just another mark.”

Sylvie’s eyes frost to the color of the rink Deacan and I skated on in winter. Flatly, she says, “So we’re back to me being a grief vampire.”

I slap a palm against the side of the elevator. Moose growls low and I take a step back from him. “Look, you admitted that you don’t even know what you’re saying to most of them. Numbers, dates, first letters of names that aren’t right but women like Madison are too desperate to notice. For fuck’s sake, Sylvie, you spoke about her brother in the past tense.” Sylvie looks away and I’m glad she’s ashamed.