This jolts him, breaks his focus. I see it in his face.

“What the hell kind of question is that?”

“Because I’m trying to figure out how much capacity for being a human you have. If any.”

His reaction is stunning. Logan Yates, the man of ice, the man who’ll come at you with biting words but no emotion, picks up the glass I’d been drinking from all night and throws it against the office door. It bursts, sending shards of Irish crystal raining through the room.

The sound of it is deafening.

The silence that follows is louder.

Do something the other guy never expects you’ll do.

His squint turns into a momentary pained scowl. Once his expression returns to its normal, indecipherable form, he says, “You don’t tell me about love. You don’t talk to me about your mother. You don’t say one more fucking thing about happiness, because with all my money, that’s the one thing I can’t afford. When she died, she took all that away. Don’t you see that?” He’s struggling so hard to maintain composure. “I’d be happier if I’d never known her at all. And if you tell me the shit about ‘better to have loved and lost,’ I’ll slap you right in the goddamn mouth.”

He’s never laid a hand on me in his life, but given the energy he’s radiating in the moment, I don’t doubt his words.

Still, I’m well past the point of fear.

“If you’d never known her,” I say, “then you’d have no daughters.”

Not even a pause. “Exactly.”

I’m not so numb that this doesn’t sting, even coming from a man who means less to me by the day.

“I have to leave here,” I say. “We’re going back to Milwaukee.”

“What good will that do?” he asks.

“I won’t be running away anymore.”

“But you will be,” he counters. “You’ve got problems there, you’ve got problems here. No matter which direction you run, you’re still running.”

My fingertips dig into the leather of the chair’s arms. “And what would Logan Yates do?”

“Confront your problems face on. Your sister is who you have to deal with immediately. Both of us do, really. Cora, she’s…” He turns and glances out the window; the sun’s reflection off the snow paints him into a ghost. “She’s unpredictable.”

It’s my turn to accuse, the desire fierce and consuming. I rise from my chair, lean over his, placing my face close to his ear. His sandalwood aftershave hits me, whisks me back thirty years, a time machine I wasn’t expecting. Tucking me in bed at night, I’d smell that exact scent, and how specific that memory is and what a narrow window in which it exists. He barely ever showed me affection, but I remember it now. How at one point he was somewhat sweet, or at least pretending to be.

“What did you do to her?” I ask.

“What?”

“Cora. What did you do to her?”

“Meaning what, exactly?”