“No, no, not that. Just…I’m supposed to have a female friend. A woman in my life who I’m not related to who I can confide in and be friendly with. Paulina said today you might be a good candidate for the job.”

“Me? Why me?”

“Throw me in the deep end, I guess.”

“And I’m the deep end?”

“You are definitely not the kiddie pool, lady.”

They’d turned into construction traffic and slowed to a crawl. The sun was high and hot, so Nora hit the button to raise the convertible top. Once latched into place, she turned the A/C on. Suddenly it was cooler, darker, and much more intimate in the car.

“This is coming from a therapist, right?” Nora asked. “Sounds like it. What do they call it? Exposure therapy. Spiders freak you out, so they have you make friends with a spider. Women freak you out, so they have you make friends with a woman?”

“Something like that,” he said. “Therapy was Paulina’s idea. And when I say ‘idea,’ I mean ‘order.’”

Nora grinned again. “So you used to play around a lot, then you met your dream girl, and now you’re behaving yourself?”

“I did not play around,” he said. “There was no playing. I made girls my second full-time job.”

“Nice work if you can get it. I guess you got it.”

“I got it,” he said. Cyrus didn’t say anything and neither did Nora. She seemed to be waiting for him to go on. “I was not a great guy back then.”

“No judgment here. I’ve been the bad guy, too,” she said. “And trust me, you’ve got nothing on King. Even after he met Juliette, it took him a long time to settle down. Céleste finally did the trick. That man is lucky to be alive. In his heyday, it was a different girl—or guy—every day almost.” She didn’t sound like she was joking.

“That’s almost better than what I was doing,” Cyrus said. “A new girl every day and nobody really gets hurt because nobody expects anything. Me? I’d play the girls, play with their minds, their hearts, make them crazy about me, make them think we had something real. Then I’d get bored, pick a new girl, start all over. Run down my list…” he said, miming an imaginary list of women’s names. “Get to the bottom. Start at the top again. Apologize. Flowers. Beg for forgiveness. Win them over.”

“Power trip.”

“You got it. Therapist thinks—I do, too—that it’s because my father died of a heart attack when I was fifteen. Tough time to lose your dad. I started looking for any way to feel better, to feel in control. I found girls.”

“What changed? You don’t seem like much of a player anymore.”

“I got shot,” Cyrus said. “I was off-duty, rolled up on a bunch of squad cars outside a gas station. Owner got shot during a robbery. They had it under control so I went home. Drove past this alley, saw a kid running—matched the description down to his yellow Adidas tennis shoes. I knew it had to be our guy. I got out and ran down the alley…came out the other side and BAM—hit right in the shoulder. Another cop thought I was the guy.”