“I would suggest it. The sooner the better. The more time you spend with her the more likely it is someone will find out, the more likely your ex-wife will find out. There’s no privacy in this world anymore. The Internet has killed that fantasy. All it takes is one person knowing or one picture or one rumor spreading...your ex-wife can hire a private detective and get all the evidence she needs in an hour to keep you away from your daughter. Most judges don’t know their asses from a hole in the ground, so trying to explain the difference between a Dominatrix and a prostitute... Well, you’d have a better chance teaching me how to tap-dance on the moon. Or teaching the Miss Nora here...”

“Math,” she suggested. “I’m really bad at math.”

“Here’s some math even you can do then,” the judge said, giving her a kind but hopeless smile. “You plus Lance equals no custody for his daughter.”

Nora swallowed a hard lump in her throat.

“I fucking hate math.”

Nora and Lance thanked the judge for his honesty and his time, and they left the house with nothing but heavy hearts and another bag of Mrs. B.’s chocolate chip cookies.

“What do you want to do?” Nora asked once inside the car. “I can take you home.”

“I don’t want to go home.” Lance leaned his head against the window. “I want to go to your house, spend the night with you and never leave your bed again.”

“I want that, too.” Nora put her hand on his knee and squeezed. “But you heard what Judge B. said.”

“I heard.”

“Lance...Listen to me. This is your Mistress talking.”

“Fine, I’m listening.”

“I’m crazy about you. But we just met a few days ago. The sex is amazing and you’re amazing, but this is something bigger than both of us.”

Lance fell silent again and Nora decided to simply drive around until he made a decision. She always felt better when driving. A car felt more at home to her than her house did. So she hits the streets and let whim dictate her directions.

And for some reason, the direction whim took her was Wakefield, Connecticut.

“Are you kidnapping me?” Lance asked when they left the city.

“Don’t tempt me. I just might. I’ll knock you out and when you wake up we’ll be in the middle of nowhere France in a beautiful little cottage with all the bondage and S&M equipment we could ever need.”

“Sounds like heaven.”

“It is heaven. Except it’s a No Children Allowed sort of Heaven. Is that your version of heaven?”

Lance didn’t answer and she didn’t expect him to. Once they entered Wakefield, Nora had to consciously force herself to drive in the opposite direction of Sacred Heart, Søren’s church...her church. Instead she steered her car a mile away into a small residential neighborhood on the outskirts of town.

“Where are we?” Lance asked as she parked in a cul-de-sac in front of a shabby pre-fab duplex with sickly pale green aluminum siding and a dead lawn. Behind the cul-de-sac stood a wall of trees, windblown and tired.