“Portia, you need to calm down.”

“Robert, I am calm, calm enough to tell you that I want the money you owe me wire-transferred into my bank account before the end of the day. I know exactly how much you got for my apartment, and I want every dime from the sale, as well as interest from the date of closing. Capisce?”

Stanley rolled his eyes. Marcus snickered. Sure, it was a little much. But she was on a roll.

Robert must have sensed that she was serious. Ever the consummate politician, he reined in the moral outrage and replaced it with something that had served him well in the past.

“Portia,” he said, his tone aggrieved. “I feel terrible that you and I have come to this. But there is no reason for you to be going on so.”

“Let me repeat myself: You must deposit every dollar you owe me in my bank account by the end of the day.”

She could all but see him, nearly two thousand miles away, formulating yet another new move, a master playing chess. She was half certain he was enjoying himself.

“I don’t have that kind of money readily available.”

“Then you’d better find a way to get it. If you don’t, I’ll make sure your constituency learns you’re a lying, cheating manipulator. I’m not so sure those same voters you say love you are going to be thrilled to reelect a man who swears he supports the sanctity of traditional marriage but got one of his employees—his wife’s best friend, at that—pregnant while he was still married.”

“I know you, Portia,” he snapped, his patience spent. “You didn’t fight me before. You won’t fight me now. Nothing’s changed. At heart, you’re still a poor girl from a trailer park, raised by a crazy grandmother.”

She laughed, which she knew he hadn’t expected. “Maybe so. But what has changed is that I’m dead serious. Mark my words, I will tell the media about Sissy, but I’ll tell the police about how you managed to sell my apartment. In case they don’t teach basic law in that fancy law school you graduated from, forgery is illegal, Robert.”

There was a moment of silence. “You wouldn’t do that.”

“Why on earth wouldn’t I?”

She heard him draw a sharp breath. “You have no way to prove I spent a second alone with Sissy before I divorced you. Or how do you think you’re going to prove I forged your signature. It’s a perfect match.”

“But that’s the thing. Someone always knows the truth. You know that staffer you got to notarize my signature on the real estate documents? F. Don Whitting?”

The phone line crackled with a tense silence.

“Do you think for a second that if the district attorney’s office starts poking around and asking questions, F. Don isn’t going to cave and admit that you made him do it? I know you, Robert. I know how you operate. Plus, I just so happen to have all the proof I need to make a believer out of your constituency about Sissy.”

She had obtained that proof of his infidelity from the fired employee.

“You can’t do this!”

She nodded to Marcus, who pressed send on an ancient fax machine they still had attached to a second phone line, sending through a photograph showing a very naked Robert and Sissy, with a date stamp in the lower right corner.

“If I were you, Robert, I’d race to your fax machine and snag the proof before someone else sees it.”

Robert cursed before the phone clattered on his desk. Portia waited, Stanley looking smug, Marcus delighted, until her ex-husband came back on the line.

“You can’t do this!” he railed.

“Granted, it’s a little low-tech in this day and age of sex videos, but I’m guessing it will do the trick. Call your lawyer, Robert. Tell him to release my money or I’ll start making some calls of my own. Police first, the Texas press second. You have until the end of the business day.”

She hung up before he could respond, and Marcus and Portia danced. Even Stanley smiled.

Forty-five

AS FAR AS Ariel could tell, her dad had really messed things up. And the guy was supposed to be smart.

Once they got back from New Jersey, instead of solving things, her dad had gone over to see Portia and obviously made things worse. He had stormed back into the house and started ripping apart the basement apartment like a man obsessed with erasing every little bit of the woman who used to live there.

On top of that, he was erasing even more of their past by putting the New Jersey house up for sale. She ached a little bit at the idea, because it was like her mom had finally been put to rest. But she also didn’t think she would ever be able to walk back into that house anyway. So why not sell it?

Now, three days after the whole asthma debacle, she came home from school to find piles of old linoleum on the front curb, waiting for the garbage truck. One more piece of Portia ripped away.

She dropped her backpack in the vestibule, then found her dad in Portia’s apartment, the place a wreck. He wore a dust mask and seemed to be taking the walls apart with a crowbar.

“What is it, Ariel?”

She stood there in the dust and wrecked surroundings, trying to decide the best way to proceed. “How’s it going?”

She couldn’t read his expression because of the mask, so she just shrugged and walked around the place, just like how she had walked around looking at things the first time she snuck in while Portia and her sisters were sitting around eating.

“Ariel? What do you need? Rosalie made some cake and left it out for you.”

Rosalie had started yesterday, replacing Portia. Not to be mean or anything, but nobody could cook like Portia, and they all knew it.

“I’m fine.” She shrugged again.

He jammed the crowbar into the top of a piece of molding.

“You know, I was wondering,” she said, proud at how casual the words sounded.

He stopped what he was doing and shot her a narrow-eyed look. She refused to let it get to her. This was too important.

“How did you find me? In New Jersey?”

He got that odd look he was getting a lot lately. Ferocious mixed with determination.

“I mean, who would have guessed. New Jersey? Seriously? You found me in New Jersey all by yourself? Ha-ha.”

“What are you getting at, Ariel?”

“Me? Getting at something?”

“Spit it out.”

And she did. “It just seems to me that you must have had some help.”

“Portia told me where to find you.” He turned around and gave the molding another sharp jerk. Nails squealed.

Of course she knew that, or at least suspected it, and hadn’t she proven she was a majorly great sleuth?

“Really?” She pretended surprise. “How’d she know where I was?”

“She said she knew because of food. And flowers.”

He sounded weird, which was super insane since Portia had been doing bizarre things with food ever since she’d landed in their town house, just as she herself had already told him.

“Portia’s good at that, you know, doing uncanny stuff with food,” she reminded him.

He just grunted, attacking the wall again.

“You remember that, right?” Ariel said.

He just gave her a look and told her to go upstairs before he slammed the crowbar back into another innocent-looking piece of molding.

“Men,” she grumbled, marching out the door.

* * *

The weather started getting cold, and it looked like pretty soon it would start snowing. Her dad just kept ripping away at the garden apartment. While he’d had a whole crowd of people slaving away on their part of the town house months earlier, he was using his own two hands to rip apart the downstairs. Every day he worked down there, and every night he sat at the kitchen table after she and Miranda had cleared away the food he had cooked.

Yep, he was cooking again. Rosalie had lasted barely a week before she had called them impossible and had departed. Ariel and Miranda had made plans, or colluded, as a good detective would say, to run the woman off. Sure, both of them felt bad about it, but someone had to do something to make their dad see the light.

Instead of seeing the light, however, and clattering off to Portia and convincing her to come back to them, he just added cooking back to his list of duties. It was insanity, really, since even he admitted he was a horrible cook and they’d probably all keel over with food poisoning any day. That, or starve.

Even more insane, Miranda had started helping him renovate the garden apartment. No sooner did Miranda get home from school than she changed and headed downstairs like a regular Mini Me Construction Girl.

Ariel told herself it was ridiculous to be jealous. Dad had chosen her to be his daughter, even when he didn’t have to.

The other surprise? Uncle Anthony.

“You know I love you, kid, right?” he said to her when he appeared one day in their kitchen, Dad looking like a ferocious, overprotective bear despite the apron he wore, since he was in the middle of making another awful dinner.

Ariel wasn’t sure what to say to that. She looked at Anthony closely, trying to decide if he was the kind of guy who wanted the truth or a platitude. The thing was, she didn’t have any idea what was in his mind.

“Sure, I know.”

He gave her a wry look. “You’re just saying that.”

“Isn’t that what you want to hear?”

“Nope. The fact is, I do love you, kid. Ariel.” He glanced over at Dad, then bent down in front of her. “But I make a better uncle than a father. Do you understand that?”