“I’ll pack my dinner jacket,” he said, teasing her gently.
She laughed, a high, false note in her voice that made him frown. “Don’t be silly. It’s just a few friends coming around. Although I’ve seen Laura’s dress, and she looks smashing.”
Something inside him froze. “Laura?”
“I know you two aren’t engaged anymore,” his mother said in that light, brittle voice. “But you did say there were no hard feelings.”
No hard feelings. He rubbed the ridge of scar tissue on his chest. No feelings at all.
That was how he functioned. He had to work with her, after all. Laura. She wasn’t his direct report. Since her transfer to Dublin, he’d been largely able to avoid her, treating her with distant, professional courtesy in meetings and on the elevator and in the halls.Robot Man, she called him, adopting Charles’s old nickname.
He wondered what she had done to prompt his mother’s transparent attempt to get them back together.
“Our families have always been so close. The Smiths are our neighbors,” Caroline was saying. “You don’t mind, do you, darling?”
Feelings stirred under the ice, an oily trickle. He shut them down, shut them off, before they spilled, corrosive as acid, over the phone.
Appalling to realize he did mind. Quite a bit, actually.
But since he had never told his mother why he had broken his engagement, he lied. “Not at all.”
“So, that’s all good, then.” Caroline’s relief was instant, palpable, and genuine. “We’ll see you in a few days.”
They ended the call. Tim stared out the window at the gray rainy street, absently rubbing the center of his chest.
A cab pulled to the curb outside, discharging its passenger, a young—very young—dark-haired woman in a striped knit cap. The driver came around to pop the boot.
The other door opened, and Dee got out.
The sight of her struck him, sharpening his awareness to patrol focus, making him sensitive to every movement and sound. She joined the driver and the dark-haired girl unloading things onto the sidewalk. A suitcase. Two suitcases. A duffel. A couple of cartons.
He frowned. If Dee needed a ride, if she needed help, he had a car. She should have called him. Asked him.
Or not. She didn’t really know him. He didn’t know the other girl at all.
He stood there, watching her, her loose braid slipping over one shoulder. Her round hips as she bent to grab another box.
He was turning into a stalker. Like Charles, howling up at Laura’s flat.
He moved away from the window.
He heard the heavy entrance door open, the sound echoing upthe stairs. A thump. Some of those boxes had looked heavy. He went out.
It was the girl in the knit cap, the one who wasn’t Dee. He fought an unjustified disappointment. She was lugging the larger of the two suitcases up the short flight to his landing.
“Can I help you?” he asked politely.
The girl stuck her nose in the air. Or maybe that was just the angle of the stairs. “I’m perfectly capable of carrying my own bag, thanks.”
Apparently he had offended her. “Quite.”
Dee backed through the front door, her arms around a box with a plant poking out the top, like an office worker ordered to clear out her desk and vacate the building by five o’clock. She tipped up her face, smiling, and his focus whirled and settled on her, a vibration in his chest, in his bones. “Hi, Tim. This is my sister, Toni.”
“Nice to meet you,” he said to the girl.
She gave him a look. He moved out of her way as she dragged the suitcase along the landing and up to Reeti’s apartment.Thump, thump, thump.
“Moving in?” he asked. Not that it was any of his business.
