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“It was not like that,” he interrupted. “It was not an affair. I was a thing she used to make him feel things, and I was angry at him, so I didn’t mind being that. Hell, I’m still angry at him.”

“So, you two were just having sex together to hurt Damian?”

“Basically.”

“Bullshit.” I glared at him.

“It wasn’t fair that he got you both, that’s all I’m saying,” said Vincent.

“Doesn’t seem to me like Damian had either of us,” I said.

Vincent shrugged, accepting that.

I picked up my sandwich, which was now barely a sandwich since I had picked it apart and littered my plate with pieces of bagel from the top slice. I took a bite of whatever was left anyway. I chewed and swallowed. “We need to find another topic.”

He picked up the manuscript. “You brought this.”

“Yeah, I should just burn this,” I said, sliding it across the table away from him.

“No, come on. You have to read it.”

“Oh, I have to let her get the last word?” I said. “She could have called me. If I had known she was dying, I would have come.”

“She did a lot of shitty things, Leo. She wasn’t always a good person.”

I snorted. “Understatement, Vincent.”

“But then, neither was I,” he said. “And neither was Damian. You, on the other hand, you were caught up in all of this, some innocent pawn, and it kills me to see that you’re thirty-two years old and you’re just… listless.”

“You said I was better now,” I said, and I was really hurt. “And I’m not listless. I have a life. I have a job and an apartment and I’m very functional.”

He nodded, ashamed of himself. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to sound like an insult. You look good, Leo, obviously. Really good.”

Something in the way his voice softened when he said that went through me like a jolt. I met his gaze again, and my stomach turned over.

He quickly looked away.

I looked away, too. I was struck by the feeling that I needed to say something, right now, say something bright, maybe a joke, change the subject—

When I looked back up, he was gazing at me again. His brown eyes cut into me.

“I’m not saying that because of…” He sighed. “You know how I meant it. Just that you look good.”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I know how you meant it.”

OPAL

I THINK THE thing that I always had a hard time admitting to people was how much I actually cared what people thought of me.

Sounds crazy, right? Because I always did things that were guaranteed to make people think terrible things about me. But it’s actually true. I wanted people to approve of me. I wanted people to want to be around me. I wanted people to like me.

I wanted to be, you know, loved.

Which was why, after I did it, I realized how badly I had screwed up.

I can’t really explain why I did it, why I made up the thing about the wallet, or why I went looking for him. Things beget things, if you know what I mean. It felt like that. It felt as if one decision gave birth to another decision. At some point, I was in so deep, I didn’t see a way back, and it felt like I just had to keep going.

Some of this was probably because I was in heat, and my mental capacity was not entirely online.