The memory reminded him that, before everything had collapsed, his childhood had been a magic carpet ride through blissful ignorance. He’d been raised with no idea that his father was a thief and his mother a maven of Junior League artifice. Neither he nor Junebug had known that their entire life as a family was built on fraud and deception. He had gone to bed each night with his dog curled next to him in a house that felt like a fortress against the world.

Maybe that was the childhood he wanted for Dorothy—a sense of carefree adventure, a secure feeling of knowing what you’d wake up to each morning. He and Regina had not resorted to fraud, of course. But subterfuge? Probably. Not on purpose, but probably.

“Buster was awesome,” Peach said. “Do you think if we got a dog, Dorothy wouldn’t mind the divorce so much?”

“Did you ever consider that maybe Dorothy wouldn’t worry so much about the divorce if her dad was happy?” Suzzy suggested.

“I’m happy and she knows it,” he snapped, annoyed.

“Uh-huh.”

“Shut up and write, Suz.”

“I will. Instead of this dumb rain check idea, I’ll write a song about a guy who likes a girl who works in a bookstore but he won’t tell her.”

“And the clichés keep coming,” he grumbled.

“Quit being one, then,” she said.

Peach was on a new project in Russian Hill, a restoration job on a 1920s town house that hadn’t been touched, probably since the 1920s. The client and his wife were both physicians—highly successful ones, judging by the budget for the reno.

He was surveying a defunct radiator, trying to figure out the best way to remove the old iron hulk. It was stamped Honeywell Heat Generator, and as he circled it with his Sawzall, he noticed a mushroom-shaped pot was connected to a container on the bottom of the device. Fitting a cast-iron blade into the saw, he was about to get to work when something tweaked a memory. Working on old buildings meant watching for hazardous materials. The little contraption behind the heater might be a big problem.

Setting aside the saw, he did some quick research on his phone. A few minutes later, he realized he was looking at a mercury pot, and it probably contained several fluid ounces of mercury.