Luke stood in his kitchen thinking he probably should have gone to the grocery store. He’d gotten tied up with running several background checks for Sutton Capital, a company his brother had connected him with that sent a lot of work his way. He’d spent an hour on the phone explaining some of the results to their human resources director.

Now he was left with either cold cereal for dinner or ordering takeout.

The dilemma was put off when he heard a knock on his door. He opened it to find Alyssa and Prentiss dressed in matching green dresses with bows on each pigtail.

“You’re invited,” they said, in near-unison.

Luke knelt and grinned at the girls. “Invited where?”

“To our birthday party.” This came from Alyssa but Prentiss nodded as though adding her stamp of approval.

The door to their apartment opened and Lyra stepped out, digging through her purse. She smiled when she saw him. “Hi, Luke.”

He wasn’t given the chance to return the greeting. Alyssa spoke up before he could. “Luke is coming!”

“Coming where?” Lyra looked at him and he raised his hands to let her know he had nothing to do with the plan the girls seemed to have concocted.

“To our party!” They were in unison again.

“That’s about as far as we got before you came out.” Luke said. He wasn’t sorry the girls had invited him.

Lyra laughed. “Tomorrow is the party with ten four and five year olds running around in a park screaming. Tonight is the friends and family pizza party. And you’re very welcome to come to either of them, but for your sanity, I’d recommend coming to tonight’s.”

Luke schooled his features and looked at the girls. “I live for pizza.” He said this with the most serious face he could muster and the girls dissolved in giggles.

He glanced up to find Lyra smiling at him. Bingo. Just what he’d been going for. Each of her smiles seemed like a prize to him. A prize he liked earning.

Alyssa and Prentiss each took a hand and pulled him out of his apartment. “Are you sure it’s okay for me to crash?” Luke said to Lyra as she locked her apartment.

“Absolutely. It’ll give me one more adult to talk to and I’m all about adult conversation.”

Christ. He wanted to know what other adult activities she might enjoy. He was all too ready to offer up his services in any way she wanted him.

Luke pulled his keys out of his pocket and locked his own door while the girls objected to their mom’s viewing them as “not adults”.

The party also included Mrs. Lawson and her grandson Murphy, who had spent twenty minutes folding paper into three types of origami fish for the girls, as well as Billy and his friends. Lyra’s boss, Joel, who was friends with Billy was there, as was Damon, another friend who Lyra told him completed the triangle of three who had lived together at different points on and off. While Joel seemed happy enough to spend time with the twins and answer any chattering the girls threw at him, Luke got the distinct impression he was really there to drool over Lyra.

It wasn’t an impression that sat well with him.

Damon, on the other hand, did little to hide the fact he’d rather be anywhere else and was killing time until Billy could leave. He spent a lot of time on his phone and didn’t seem to have any interest in talking to anyone there, no matter their age.

Tracy and Savannah were there, along with their children. Luke liked them. Both women made no effort to hide the fact that they were trying to push Luke and Lyra together. If for no other reason, he liked that about them. But they were also funny and he got the sense that they had been there for Lyra through a lot. They were close. He liked that about them, too.

The evening revolved around the girls, with cheese pizzas, hot fudge sundaes, and what seemed to be hundreds of tokens spent in the arcade at the back of the pizza place. Billy, Joel, and Damon ended up crowded around one of the race car games where they took turns in the two seats competing against each other.

Tracy and Savannah scored more points in Luke’s book when they took all the kids to the arcade, leaving Lyra and Luke to “watch the table.”

“So you’re doing all this again tomorrow, but with more kids?”

“Yup, this is the easy one. This is a tradition Billy started a couple of years ago to get out of having to go to the kids version of the birthday party. He prefers beer and pizza and the girls think it’s fun to have a grown-up party, so I never argue with it. Besides, he pays for this one.” She said this with a grin and Luke laughed.

Murphy came over and interrupted. “I’m going to get Grandma home, Lyra. She’s not feeling well.”

Lyra looked toward the other of the two booths they’d commandeered where Mrs. Lawson sat. “Oh, I’m sorry. Is she all right?”

Luke had to admit, the woman looked pale.

Murphy nodded, but his face was set in a grim line. “She just needs to rest.”

They said their goodbyes before Luke brought the conversation back around to Billy. He hated to think it, but he had to wonder if Billy was involved with the Brain Trust. He spent a lot of time at Lyra’s apartment. “I guess I wouldn’t have pegged the bartender as someone who wants to throw around a good chunk of money on a beer and pizza party for twin girls.”

“Billy likes to spend money on anything that doesn’t smack of too much responsibility. Since leaving school, he’s started and stopped several businesses, and most of them failed because he doesn’t like to be locked in by a business plan. His words, not mine. Billy is a very fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants kind of guy.”

“You don’t strike me that way.” Luke looked at her and noticed the tinge of pink that lit her cheeks. “Not that that’s a bad thing. I like planning.”

“Yeah, Billy and I are definitely opposites as far as that’s concerned.” She looked over at her brother where he was currently spinning the handle of his race car and hooting as he bested Joel on the track. “He’s a good guy, he’s always there for me, but he’s still very much a kid at heart. I’m not sure he’s going to be ready to grow up anytime soon.”

“Are his friends usually in on those businesses with him? They seem pretty tight.” Luke eyed the three men and had a feeling he knew why everything about the Brain Trust was leading back to Lyra. His gut clenched when he thought about someday having to reveal to Lyra just what her brother had set her up for. Looking at him, you wouldn’t guess he’d do that to Lyra.

Lyra made a face. “Yeah, on occasion, Damon and Joel will run off and try something new. Joel’s dad has stopped funding everything except the company I work for, since that one typically pays its own bills. Damon is a little more level-headed. After they all graduated from college, Damon went on to study psychiatry. He left that program before getting his degree, but did go and get his LCSW.”

The news of Damon being a licensed clinical social worker raised another flag. Luke could see the fingerprints of someone who understood psychiatry and mental health all over the manipulations taking place in the Brain Trust. Not to mention, Damon didn’t at all seem like he would want to use an LCSW for anything like its intended use.

“He’s a social worker?” He asked, not quite seeing it as he looked at Damon across the room.

“No, he runs a small therapy clinic. Private practice.”

The twins came rushing over with Alyssa talking a mile a minute and Prentiss nodding her agreement next to her. “We did it, Mommy. We got the mouse all the way to the top without any help from Aunt Tracy or Aunt Savvy. Nobody had to help us at all this time.”

“That’s fantastic, girls.” Lyra pulled the girls into her lap and snuggled them. They allowed the move for a split second before they ran away.

“The mouse?” Luke asked as he watched the girls run back to an arcade game.

“You have to use your gun to pump enough air at the right target to get the mouse to go all the way up the clock. Hickory dickory dock?”

“Ah. Got it.” He liked watching Lyra relax. He’d seen her laugh and smile a lot tonight, and it felt good to see.

A couple walked by the table and Luke knew they’d been sitting across the room earlier. Old habits die hard. He’d never stopped monitoring any room he was in, taking in who was where doing what. Who moved around and who stayed put. Who looked right in the space and who looked “off.”

This couple was simply a young couple out for a night together. They’d eaten, and were now walking out.

The woman leaned in to the table. “Your daughters are beautiful.”

Luke felt a kick in his gut at the words, but didn’t have time to identify what he was feeling before the woman continued.

“Where did you get them?”

Luke tried to process the question, wondering if the woman thought maybe Lyra had run on over to a clearance sale at Macy’s to pick up the twins. What on earth kind of a question was that?

Lyra didn’t bat an eye, instead answering with a smile. “Right straight out of my uterus. Well, through the birth canal, so I guess I can’t say straight out, but you get the idea.”

The woman glanced back and forth at Lyra and Luke, then down to where Luke’s hand rested on Lyra’s. He wasn’t sure when that had happened, but he was glad it had. “Oh.” She seemed to struggle for a minute. “I just thought . . . ”

She didn’t finish the thought, but walked away with a puzzled look on her face, as though she were still trying to figure things out.

“Does that happen often?” Luke asked.

Lyra nodded. “All the time. People think they’re adopted. I’ve even had people tell me it’s so wonderful of me to have taken them. Like they don’t bring more joy to my life than I could ever bring to theirs.”

Luke stared at her. People walked up and asked that kind of question all the time? And she didn’t flatten them?

Lyra laughed. “You get used to it and start to have fun with it. Savvy adopted Tessa. If Tessa isn’t within earshot, she says she picked her up at a tag sale—best bargain she’s ever gotten.”

“They ask right in front of Tessa!” It wasn’t a question, but she answered with raised brows and a nod anyway.

Luke felt his blood begin to simmer. “Tell me people don’t ask you that in front of Prentiss and ‘Lyss?” His voice was low.

“They do. I told the girls people are jealous and are hoping they can get a pair of twins of their own. They said maybe not everyone realized how rare and special twins are.”

Luke let out a huff of laughter, but he was still stuck on the fact the girls had heard that.

“Hey,” Lyra leaned into his line of vision and he realized he’d been glaring at some point in the distance. “If I let everything like that get to me, I’d miss the good stuff, like having those girls in my life in the first place. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to lose my husband and not have any piece of him with me. They’re a blessing.”

The air had turned heavy and thick, and Luke realized he was now holding both her hands across the table. They weren’t exactly in the most romantic of places, surrounded by the vinyl booths of the pizza place with the background ambiance of children laughing and video games buzzing.

A smile cut Luke’s face and the tension. “When Naomi was little, she figured out that people sometimes questioned whether I was her dad or not if I was dragging her mid-tantrum out of a mall or a store. We had a few of those episodes in the year after the accident, when she was really struggling. One day, she decided she could use it. She starts screaming that I’m not her dad at the top of her lungs.”

Lyra’s eyes went wide. “She didn’t.”

“Oh, she did. I stopped right then and there, sat my ass down to wait for the cops to arrive.”

“They didn’t.”

“They did. And I didn’t want to be attacked by an angry mob before they got there.”

Lyra now had her hand over her mouth and she seemed to be alternating between gasping in horror and laughing at the image of him sitting and waiting for the cops to arrive. “What happened?”

“Naomi thought it was a good idea for about two seconds, but when people tried to pull her away from me, she thought the better of it. Between that and being grounded for a month, she didn’t try it again.”