Despite her misery, she couldn’t forget her promise to help Bree clean up from last night’s vandalism, but before she could get to the cottage, Mike called and told her that he and Toby were handling the mess—no girls allowed. She didn’t protest.

She waited until afternoon to get her things from the cottage. She discovered a dreamy-eyed Bree sitting at the kitchen table with a notepad, an equally infatuated Mike at her side. The faint beard-burn on Bree’s neck and Mike’s tender, proprietary manner didn’t leave much doubt about what the two of them had been up to last night while Toby slept.

“You can’t leave,” Bree said when Lucy revealed her intention. “I’m working on a plan to save my business, and I’m going to need you more than ever.”

Mike tapped a legal pad covered with notes in Bree’s precise handwriting. “We don’t want you in that big house by yourself,” he said. “We’ll worry about you.”

But the two of them could barely take their eyes off each other long enough to talk to her, and Toby was no better. “Mike and Bree are getting married!” he announced when he came into the kitchen.

Bree smiled. “Settle down, Toby. Nobody’s getting married to anybody yet.”

The looks Mike and Toby exchanged suggested they had other ideas about that.

Lucy wouldn’t spoil their happiness with her own misery. She promised to come over the next afternoon and waved good-bye.

She continued to nourish her anger, but after a few days of furious, solitary walks and lengthy bike rides that still didn’t wear her out enough to sleep, she knew she had to do something else. Finally she opened the laptop Panda had left behind and got back to work. At first she couldn’t concentrate, but gradually she found the distraction she needed.

Maybe it was the pain from her breakup with Panda, but she found herself thinking more and more about the earlier pain she’d endured from spending the first fourteen years of her life with a biological mother who was a professional party girl.

“Lucy, I’m going out tonight. The door’s locked.”

“I’m scared. Stay here.”

“Don’t be a baby. You’re a big girl now.”

But she hadn’t been a big girl—she’d been eight—and over the next few years, she’d become the only responsible person in their dismal household.

“Lucy, damn it! Where’s that money I hid in the back of my drawer?”

“I used it to pay the damn rent! Do you want us to get kicked out again?”

She’d always believed her sense of responsibility had begun after Sandy had died, when she’d had to take care of Tracy on her own, but now she understood it had begun long before that.