I smile. “Do you have a sugar daddy on the sly?”

Another phlegmy laugh. “Not hardly.” She pats the tank next to her like a favorite pet, her fingers resting on the knob. “I keep waiting for Amazon to figure out they’ve got the wrong address and take everything back, but they never do.”

“Sounds like you found yourself a guardian angel.”

She closes her eyes and sighs. “If you see him, tell him what I could really use is a new heart.”

As we file out the door, my hand goes instinctively to my stomach, and I’m struck with the thought of how fragile we all are, how vulnerable and temporary. How one moment we can think we have it all, a home and a family and good health, and the next—poof—it’s all gone.

27

Chet and I return home to a kitchen full of people—Paul and Diana and Micah and Chief Hunt, standing in a cluster by the island—and an air thick with sudden silence. The kind that comes after wrangling words and heated voices. The kind they stopped hurling around the second we walked through the door.

Paul turns, watching me with that beat-up brow and blackened eye, an angry kaleidoscope of black and purple and red. His expression sucks up all the air in the kitchen.

“What is it? What’s going on?”

I dump my bag and keys onto the counter and look around for clues, but there’s nothing but marble on the countertop between us, and in a house where visits revolve around topped-up glasses and trays overflowing with finger foods. But whatever this occasion is, Diana is dressed for it. Full makeup, silky top, leather motorcycle jacket over dark jeans, her hair slicked back into a high ponytail. She looks like a Charlie’s Angel, cougar edition.

“I’m here to talk to Chet,” Chief Hunt says, and a memory flickers. Of a younger version of him busting in our door, tackling my father to the ground, hog-tying his hands and feet. I was only six at the time—too young to remember the details, but that doesn’t mean my bones don’t still shake at the image of their bodies hitting the floor, that I don’t hear my father’s grunts or taste the fear and shame climbing up my throat. Memories are strange that way. They don’t have to be real to feel visceral.

But my fear of Chief Hunt, the way the sight of him sends my heart flapping around like a caged bird against my ribs—that is 100 percent real.

Chet parks his boots at the edge of the room. “Did Annalee send you? Because I told her I’d pay her back.”

“This isn’t about Annalee, Chet. This is about Sienna Sterling.”