This job being one of them."
"I'm sorry about the breakup," he said, his dark eyes warm with sympathy.
"Yeah.
Me, too."
Cary was looking and feeling better by Saturday.
His ribs were still bandaged and his arm was going to be in a cast for a while, but he was walking around on his own and didn't need the nurse anymore.
My mom brought a beauty team over to our apartment - six women in white lab coats who took over my living room.
Cary was in heaven.
He had no qualms whatsoever about enjoying spa day.
My mom looked tired, which wasn't like her at all.
I knew she was worried about Stanton.
And she was maybe spending time thinking about my dad, too.
It seemed impossible to me that she wouldn't, after seeing him for the first time in nearly twenty-five years.
His longing for her had been hot and alive to me; I couldn't imagine what it must have felt like to her.
As for me, it was just great to be around two people who loved me and knew me well enough not to bring up Gideon or give me a hard time for being a bummer to hang around with.
My mom brought me a box of my favorite Knipschildt truffles, which I savored slowly.
It was the one indulgence she never scolded me about.
Even she agreed that a woman had a right to chocolate.
"What are you going to have done?" Cary asked me, looking at me with a bunch of black goop smeared all over his face.
He was getting his hair trimmed in its usual sexily floppy style, and his toenails were being trimmed and filed into perfect rounded squares.
I licked the chocolate off my fingers and considered my answer.
The last time we'd had a spa date, I'd just agreed to have an affair with Gideon.
He and I were going on our first date, and I knew we'd be ha**ng s*x.
I'd chosen a package designed for seduction, making my skin soft and fragrant with scents purported to have aphrodisiac properties.
Everything was different now.
In a way, I had a second chance to do things over.
The investigation into Nathan's death was a concern for us all, but the fact that he was gone from my life forever liberated me in a way I hadn't realized I'd needed.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, the fear must have been lurking there.
It was always a possibility that I could see him again as long as he was alive.
Now I was free.