“When the police told you your sister had drowned in the tub at home, all I could think about was your mama,” Jesse said. “I thought Claudia had deliberately copied the way your mama did it, even down to the date on the calendar. You know, like Sylvia Plath’s son did when he killed himself. Do the police know about her?”

“I didn’t tell them, but they knew it from a neighbor.” When Bruxton had asked me When were you planning to tell us about your mother? in his broad, upstate accent, my first reaction was that he had contacts who’d filled him in about my crazy family. I wondered what else the neighbor knew, but I was afraid to ask. “They were assuming Claudia was a copycat suicide. That would have been the worst thing of all.”

“What do you mean?”

I pushed some food around my plate, aware I was tugging at the scab of an emotional wound that had scarred over but never healed properly. “It would be like a signal that... My whole family is so crazy that…” I tripped over my words, and it wasn’t because of the wine. I swallowed hard. “It would be like finding out you inherited a horrible disease. That your dark fate was written into your stars and genes.” I shook my head, hoping Jesse wouldn’t notice that my eyes were wet. “That certainly sounded self-pitying and stupid.” I took a long gulp of merlot.

Jesse grasped my hand, willing me to look at him. “There’s nothing stupid about that. For cryin’ out loud, if it is, I’m guilty of the same.”

I moved closer to him and put my head on his shoulder. He wrapped an arm around me. We rarely went into this particular minefield, but around the time of my mother’s suicide, Jesse’s father had killed his mother and then put a bullet in his own brain. He told me later that his mother’s cancer was so advanced that it had paralyzed her from the waist down. In the aftermath of our family tragedies, Jesse and I were shocked out of what should have been carefree student existences marked only by dramas involving the men we slept with. We were fast friends who hid from true intimacy with anyone else behind glamorous armor. An invisible barrier separated us from everyone else. The only consolation had been that we’d been on the same side of that barrier.

By the time we left Jannat, I’d made a decision. “I have to talk to Tariq,” I told Jesse, while we waited in the foyer for the valet to bring Ginger back.

“You’re itchin’ to go on over to his place. I can tell.”

“How did you know?” Jesse rolled his eyes at me. “I’m being predictable again, aren’t I?”

“Let’s just say you’ve never been a patient gal, Tiger Lily.”