“Then you go gung ho, nearly losin’ your job, I might add, pullin’ out all the stops to take that motherfucker down. I get that too. Then she finds her way to deal and she does it usin’ a needle. She checks way the fuck out before she injected too much of that poison and finally checks out. What do you do when your ex-fuckin’-girlfriend overdoses? You leave the force and take a job with the fucking Drug Enforcement Agency and no one fuckin’ sees you. You’re undercover, livin’ with the scum of the earth on some wild-ass crusade to turn back time and bring Bree back. Well, man, you can’t do that. It isn’t Bree’s ass hangin’ out there, ’cause she’s dead. It’s yours. Mom, Jill, and Laura, and, I’ll admit, me, we all lost sleep with you doin’ that job, wonderin’ when the call would come.”

“Well, now you don’t have to lose sleep, Levi,” Brock said low.

“No, now we don’t. ’Cause sweet Tess and her cakes are in your life now.”

I moved closer to the wall of the landing and tried not to hyperventilate.

“Careful,” Brock snarled.

“Careful?” Levi asked. “Not even for your own fuckin’ wife, and I will give it to you, I wouldn’t do shit for that bitch either, but not for your own fuckin’ boys did you leave that job. But Tessa O’Hara with her haunted eyes walks into your life and what do you do?” A pause, then, “No, your answer will be bullshit so don’t even say it because you told Laurie and Laurie told me that you knew before you even approached her to see if she’d accept you back in her life that you looked for a way out of the DEA so you could concentrate on her and give her what you didn’t give Olivia and you couldn’t give Bree, seein’ as the bitch essentially killed herself and took her time doin’ it.”

My heart started thumping and my legs started trembling.

Levi kept talking.

“And not only that, you lived in your goddamned place since Olivia took your ass to the cleaners but all of a sudden”—another pause where I visualized him throwing out an arm—“here you are in a sweet condo that sweet Tessa of Tessa’s Cakes would find more agreeable. So now you’re a homicide detective with a middleclass condo and five months ago you were an agent for the DEA with a death wish but at least you had a fuckin’ mission and all that is for her. Fuck, I’m lookin’ at my brother in his fuckin’ kitchen with new fuckin’ dishtowels and I don’t even know who the fuck he is because he’s losin’ all that he is, again, for another, lost, haunted soul with a great pair of tits.”