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“He got in touch yesterday, and we had a date. We saw a movie at that fancy theater last night.”
“Your mother has been bugging me to take her.”
“You should go. It’s a great flick and the venue is nice and comfortable.”
“Okay, are you going to bring him around to Roberta’s again?”
“I don’t think so. He’s got a lot going on right now. He has to find a place to live. We’re going this afternoon to look at an apartment over by my place.”
“What’s wrong with where he’s staying?”
She didn’t want to go into the custody-of-Grace thing with her father.
“I guess he just wants privacy,” she replied. “Dad, I’d better hang up. I’m looking at ads with the new guy.”
“Okay, well, knock ’em dead!”
They said goodbye and she hung up. Concentrating on advertising and page layouts wasn’t helping a contradictory feeling Sofia had fought since sleeping with Ryan, that a ghost was observing all she did. Jake’s ghost. She was completely into Ryan, and then she’d get the feeling Jake was looking down on her over Ryan’s shoulder. And the oddest thing was she didn’t think it was incriminatory, far from it. He was trying to encourage her, like he had been orchestrating a relationship between her and Ryan from the very beginning.
Shaking the thoughts from her head, she tried to focus on work. Finally, at eleven, Ryan called her.
“I’m parked outside. Can you get away?”
“Give me one minute and I’m on my way out.”
She stepped out onto the sidewalk when it hit. He was standing at the curb, ready to open her door.
“You have a car!”
“I have a car!”
The impulse not to burst out laughing took all her strength; the car was a wreck, at least fifteen years old with a badnewpaint job and a trash bag duct-taped over the passenger-side back window.
“I’m not sure…”
“Trust me, it runs like a dream. Only has a hundred ten thousand miles on it.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“One of the guys at the Depot gave it to me. I need transportation. He promised me it has never not started, and all I had to do was get insurance and pay for registration.”
Giggling, she didn’t want to say she was embarrassed to be seen in the car. “Are you sure you want to meet a rental agent in this thing?”
“It’s exactly the car I want to pull up in when I’m getting ready to make a financial deal,” he said, chuckling.
“Does it have seatbelts?”
“Yes, it’s got all the safety features, including air bags, and furthermore, the air-conditioning works.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, smirking, the joke being her car’s air-conditioning didn’t work, and in the heat of summer it was torture.
“We could walk to this place, but I want to show off the car.”
“Right.”
Just north from her place, he pulled into a gated driveway and spoke with the gatekeeper.
“I love this place, Ryan. Does the unit have a view?”
