Luther drove back through the graying night and let himself into the house on Elwood. He stood in the living room and watched his wife sleep in the chair where he’d left her. He went into the bedroom and lifted the mattress. He placed most of Owen Tice’s money under there and then he went back out into the parlor and stood and looked at his wife some more. She snored softly and groaned once and pulled her knees closer to her belly.

She’d been right in everything she’d said.

But, oh, she’d been cold. She’d seen to breaking his heart as much as he, he now realized, had broken hers these last months. This house he’d feared and bristled at was something he now wished he could wrap his arms around and carry out to Jessie’s car and take with him wherever he was going.

“I do so love you, Lila Waters Laurence,” he said and kissed the tip of his index finger and touched it to her forehead.

She didn’t stir, so Luther leaned over and kissed her belly and then he left his home and went back to Jessie’s car and drove north with the dawn rising over Tulsa and the birds waking from their sleep.

CHAPTER ten

For two weeks, if her father wasn’t home, Tessa came to Danny’s door. They rarely slept, but Danny wouldn’t call what they did making love. A bit too raw for that. On several occasions, she gave the orders—slower, faster, harder, put it there, no there, roll over, stand up, lie down. It seemed hopeless to Danny, the way they clawed and chewed and squeezed each other’s bones. And yet he kept returning for more. Sometimes, walking the beat, he’d find himself wishing the uniform weren’t so coarse; it rubbed parts of him that had already been scratched to the last layer of flesh. His bedroom on those nights gave off the feel of a lair. They entered and tore at each other. And while the sounds of the neighborhood did reach them—an occasional car horn, the shouts of children kicking a ball in the alleys, the neighs and huffs from the stables behind their building, even the clank of footsteps on the fire escape of some other tenants who’d discovered the attraction of the roof he and Tessa had abandoned—they seemed the sounds of an alien life.

For all her abandon in the bedroom, Tessa withheld herself when the sex was finished. She would sneak back to her room without a word and never once fell asleep in his bed. He didn’t mind. In fact, he preferred it this way—heated yet cold. He wondered if his part in all of this unleashing of unnameable fury was tied into his feelings for Nora, his urge to punish her for loving him and leaving him and continuing to live.

There was no danger he would fall in love with Tessa. Or she with him. In all their snakelike commingling he sensed contempt above all, not just she for him, or he for her, but both of them for their barren addiction to this act. Once, when she was on top, her hands clenched against his chest, she whispered, “So young,” like a condemnation.