If anything, Nova was almost angelic looking. Her hair was straight and hung just past her shoulders, like chestnut silk. She had olive skin, but freckles right across her nose, which made her seem even younger than her twenty-four years. Her curvy little body was wrapped in a severe, almost matronly dress, and she looked like she was playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes.

My lawyer had told me that her parents had died in a car crash twelve weeks ago. I could almost see it in the way her body was bowing in on itself in grief. I knew that feeling all too well.

But I didn’t want to feel sorry for her. Not at all.

As if she could tell I was watching her, she turned those big eyes my way. From this distance, I couldn’t tell what color they were, but she looked at me, petrified, and some part of me was satisfied that she was freaking the hell out.

You reap what you sow. That’s what my foster parents had always said. Didn’t matter that neither Nova Stone or I had done any of the sowing in this situation.

Devan slapped my back. “Stop staring at her like you want to eat her. We still need to get on her good side. Otherwise, we’ll never see Huey again.”

His words were gruff and bitter, and I looked over at my brother. Not by blood, but by bond. Me, Devan and Alana had made a pact to look after each other, and the weight of our failure sat heavy on us both.

I’d been out partying it up with puck bunnies and too much vodka, while she’d been seduced and taken advantage of by some old, married fuck. I’d been skating around, making a name for myself, and she’d been giving birth to a baby that the father refused to acknowledge. Devan had been there at the birth, but I should have been there too.

We’d both been too far away when she’d had a stroke and died, Huey beside her on the bed. It was only sheer luck that her next-door neighbor had been bringing her breakfast every morning and had found them.

Because I hadn’t been there.

The doctors had told us it was a postpartum intracranial hemorrhage. They were rare, but they happened—there was nothing anyone could have done. But it happened to my best friend, while she was alone.

I should’ve forced her to move back to Ann Arbor with me and Devan. But she’d argued her whole life was here in Tucson. He was here in Tucson. Huey’s father.

She hadn’t known he was dead a month before Huey was born. Would she have come home with me if she had? The endless what-ifs were killing me.