“Feelings change.”

“Yes, and quickly. Because we’ve only known each other a month. And what if your feelings change again in another month? Sam always told me that nothing lasts, and that relationships destroy the individual. And clearly that’s what you’ve experienced yourself with Paulina. Why would it be any different for the two of us?”

“Did you ever stop to think that Saint Sam might not know everything?”

Anger heated her cheeks as she pointed a shaking finger. “Don’t you dare talk about him.”

“Why not? You brought him up. I’m sure he was a fine fellow, but he’s dead, Aida. He’s been dead for more than ten years. When are you going to stop living your life to please him?”

“He’s none of your damn business!”

“Unfortunately he is my damn business, because he’s come between me and the woman I love.”

Love? She didn’t mean to gasp—if that’s what the noise coming out of her mouth could be called. It was so loud, it sounded as though she were choking. She felt like she was. A brutal weight struck her chest and strangled her heart. She stood in place, unnaturally glued to the tile floor as if under a spell.

“That’s what I thought,” Winter said. “No response. I suspect you’d let your martyrlike mission to preserve Sam’s idiotic ideas overshadow anything at all you might feel, so God only knows whether you care for me in return.”

I do. She wanted to say it out loud, but her throat wouldn’t work. Her fingers were going numb. She felt . . . she felt as though she were going into shock.

If she could articulate what she felt, she’d have told him she was overwhelmed with feelings for him. But it was something she’d never experienced before, and she was terrified. She’d have told him that she wanted more than anything to stay here and be with him.

But Winter didn’t give her time to manage it. “Sam was an eighteen-year-old boy who was trying to rationalize the meaning of life,” he said. “Did you ever stop to think that he may have changed his tune after a few years?”

“I’ll never know, because he didn’t get a few more years.”

“But you’ll spend the rest of yours molding your life around a memory?”

Tears came, fast and strong. She felt like a quaking rabbit cornered by a wolf, unable to think properly. Unable to do anything but position herself to cut and run. “W-why am I the only one forced to take a risk? You want me to stay, but only as your mistress. Did you ever stop to think how I will be perceived if I stay here permanently? Everyone knows you. Everyone will know me, too, and they will talk.”

“Who cares if they do?”

“I do! It will affect me and any kind of business endeavors I’d attempt to make.”

“Bullshit. No one cares about that anymore.”

“Your parents did, or your mother wouldn’t have pushed you into a marriage with someone you didn’t even like.” She swiped tears from her eyes. “If Sam’s memory taints my choices, then your horrible relationship with Paulina taints yours.”

Cold eyes stared at her from across the table. A muscle in his jaw jumped. He took a deep breath and looked at his hands. “Maybe Paulina just opened my eyes to what marriage really is.”

“And pray tell, what exactly did dearest Paulina teach you about marriage?”

“That it’s a piece of paper—a legal document that has nothing to do with feelings or trust or affection or friendship. It’s a goddamn business transaction, and I will not reduce what’s between us to a court filing whose only purpose is to bind people together for the sake of money!”

“And I will not keep repeating what you already know—if you think I want money from you, then you can damn well keep believing that while I’m on the train to New Orleans!”

Rage transformed Winter’s face into something demonic, the kitchen’s pendant lights casting harsh, craggy shadows down the planes of his face. He slammed his fist on the table, making both it and Aida jump. As his paperwork scattered, some of it fluttering to the floor, he stormed around and stalked her. She backed up, but he kept coming until he was towering over her like a fiend rising from the abyss. Steam from the simmering stockpot whirled around his dark head.

“Go on, then.” His breath was hot on her face, his anger hot as flames licking her skin. “Get out of my house and don’t fucking come back. I don’t ever want to see your face again.”

His words boiled her heart right inside her chest. And the tears that spilled down her cheeks weren’t enough to extinguish the damage he’d done.

“GET OUT!”

She stumbled backward, turned, and without another word, fled the room.

* * *

Winter slammed the heel of his palm against the porcelain icebox. Did that really happen? He could hardly believe it. He listened to Bo’s voice, hearing snatches of his conversation with Aida outside in the hallway. A minute later, he heard an engine, and assumed Jonte was driving her to Gris-Gris for her last show.

The telephone rang. He let someone else answer. After a few moments, Bo slipped inside the kitchen. Winter prepared himself for the speech, but to Bo’s credit, it didn’t come.

“I know you might not want to hear this right now, but that was Velma on the line.”

Winter grunted. It was all he could manage.

“She was calling to say that they’re reporting on the radio that two unidentified men in Chinatown were burned alive inside a black truck that misfired outside a grocer’s shop. Witnesses said a couple of folks tried to help the men when the truck started burning, but the locks were stuck on both doors, and they were afraid it would explode—which it did.”

Christ alive. The curse worked.

“No identification on the bodies. No registration plates on the truck,” Bo added. “Cops think it might’ve been stolen. I’ll check in with one of our guys on the inside and see if I can get any other information.”

After Winter muttered his thanks, Bo retreated, leaving him alone in the kitchen with nothing but his incoherent thoughts. His world was breaking apart. He was numb on the inside, worn down on the outside. He couldn’t move or think properly. Could barely focus his eyes on Greta when her silver head appeared in the doorway.

“Are you all right, gulleplutten?” she asked.

He stood up and pulled the front of his suit into place, trying to wrestle some control over his feelings, and heard the crinkle of paper from his inner suit pocket. Emmett Lane’s check to Aida. He could’ve handed it over, given her the chance to make an informed choice, but he wanted her to choose to stay for him, not money.

He’d put his heart on a plate for her, and she wouldn’t say the words back. Maybe he’d been fooling himself to believe she felt the same way.

He glanced up at Greta. “Have her things packed and brought down to the foyer.”

* * *

Aida’s last performance at Gris-Gris was her all-time worst. Unable to call spirits for not one, not two, but three audience members—and unwilling to fake it—she was booed off the stage.

A career first.

Maybe a career last, if word got back to her future employer down South.

“It happens to the best of us,” Velma said generously, patting her on the back as she handed over the last of her wages. “Maybe you’re distracted by something you want to talk about?”

Aida shook her head. She would only start crying again.

After Hezekiah and Daniels both hugged her, after she’d said all her good-byes, she left in disgrace, heading through the back delivery door.

Pausing under the doorway light, she pulled her gloves from her handbag and stared up at the fog tenting the narrow alleyway. Well. What now? All her new things were at Winter’s house.

And so was Winter.

She closed her eyes and exhaled heavily, then slipped her hand into a glove. “Okay, Palmer,” she muttered to herself. “Let’s think about this rationally.”

Maybe he’d been right that no one would care about their affair. She wasn’t leading a Girl Scout troop, after all. And how could she argue that they didn’t know their own feelings well enough after a month, but insist that he make a public demonstration to last a lifetime?

Right or wrong, it didn’t mean she had to leave the state to prove her argument, stomping off like a petulant child. Yes, she loved this city, and some insistent part of her did feel like it was home. So he was right about two things.

And really, when she considered, she could get a bank loan—he was right about that, too, damn him! Just a small one, enough to pay for a few months’ rent at a cheap place, perhaps one with an apartment attached, so she could live and work out of the same place to save money.

He’s come between me and the woman I love.

Did Winter mean that? Did he really love her?

On a sigh, she let her arms flop to her sides. Her handbag slipped off her wrist, dropping to the pavement. The contents of her handbag scattered. She bent to collect them all.

“You all right, Miss Palmer?”

She looked up. One of the club’s guards, Manny, was leaning out of the back door.

“I’m fine,” she lied as she scooped everything back into her handbag. “Thank you.”

“Miss Palmer!” A new voice called to her several yards away, at the mouth of the alley. A man stood next to a car with the door open, waving to her. Clouds of exhaust pumped from the tailpipe as the engine rumbled. It took her a second to recognize the man’s face.

“Doctor Yip,” she said with a smile, standing to greet him. “What brings you out to North Beach?”