Chapter 4: Garage

Roxy Whitlow met me in the hospital cafeteria with two coffees and a legal pad.

She is a paralegal, she has red curls she never tames, and she has never once told me I was overreacting.

"Say it from the top," she said.

I told her everything, from the chair to the phone call in the guest wing.

When I finished, she wrote a single word on the pad and underlined it.

"Lock," she said. "He called you a lock."

"That's what he called me."

"And you're going to let his son flirt with you."

"I'm going to let him think it's working."

"June." She put her pen down. "You hate lying. You told your cousin you hated her wedding cake to her face."

"It was dry."

"It was a nice wedding."

"Roxy, my father is out on a balcony at four in the morning. Help me."

She picked the pen up again.

"Don't sign anything," she said. "Not a napkin. And I'll pull everything on Russell Kane. Property, courts, anything with his name."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Just don't sleep with the con man's son."

"I'm not going to."

Roxy looked at my face and wrote something else on the pad, and I did not ask what.

That night Chet picked me up at ten.

I had worked a double, and I got in the car with my shoes in my hand.

"Long day?" he said.

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