She returned to the kitchen to find Mac standing in it, looking about thoughtfully. As if mulling what kinds of repairs it might need.

She walked past him, opened up a drawer, fished out two forks, and handed one to him.

He sat down opposite her at the card table.

They ate the still-warm lasagna from opposite sides of the pan. Silently. He ate with unselfconscious gusto, chewed with his mouth closed, and waited for her to gesture that it was okay to plow through the next third because she didn’t want it. She was impressed.

Suddenly he paused and went so alertly still it was as though he was about to say, “Hark!”

“Is that toilet still running?”

She listened. “Yep,” she concurred grimly.

“I think it was last replaced around 1950. Valve probably needs replacing.”

She sighed. “Naturally.”

And that was it for the conversation until he put his fork down about ten minutes later.

He leaned back and regarded her as if she might be the next course.

“That was good.”

“The lasagna?”

“Of course the lasagna. The other thing was . . .” He paused, and gazed, ceiling-ward, apparently mulling, then slowly lowered his head again. “. . . Do you have a thesaurus? Because I’m not sure a word has been invented yet for what that was.”

Her heart flipped over.

And their gazes locked.

She got up from the table abruptly. She collected the forks and the scraped-clean lasagna pan and put them in the sink. She ran the water for a rather unnecessarily long time over the forks.

And there was a little silence.

“Soooo now that I have you in sexual thrall . . . yooooou will sell me the hooooouse.”

He mimicked a hypnotist’s intonation.

It was a foray.

He was trying to gauge her mood.

She snorted. “You’re not that good.” She still didn’t have the nerve to turn around yet.

She could practically feel the rays of his smile on the back of her neck like a sunbeam. He was perverse, Mac was, but every time it was like opening up a window and allowing crisp air in.

“If that’s just your way of daring me to up my game . . .”

Oh God. Just the idea of him upping his game and how he might demonstrate that made her knees turn to butter.

She drew in a long, deep breath for courage and pivoted.

Yep, he was still as good-looking as three seconds earlier.

He looked a trifle warier.

Mac was smart.

“About that. I just . . . Okay. While it was good . . .”

“No, we established, the lasagna was good.”

But now he also looked alert. And tense.

“Okay. Yes. I agree. This was . . . what we did was . . . something else. I mean, it was really . . . And it was . . . a surprise.”

“Was it?” he said. Ironically amused.

She ignored that. “BUT . . .” She took another long sustaining breath. “I’m sorry, but I shouldn’t have. I just . . . the thing with Corbin is so recent and I don’t know where my head is at, honestly. Or where I’ll be a month from now. I just have no business getting involved in anything like . . . I just don’t think the pre-lasagna activity is a good idea. Going forward. Is that okay?”

Wow. Nothing like a little Word Salad to go with the lasagna, Avalon, she told herself. Silently.

Mac had gone still again.

He took this in during a silence that seemed to ring.

“Okay,” he said evenly. Finally.

She hadn’t the faintest idea what he was thinking. But she recognized that look as one disguising an awful lot of internal mulling.

He didn’t ask for clarification. Even though God only knew it was warranted and an argument could be made that he was entitled to it.

She didn’t ask him if he had any follow-up questions. She wasn’t giving a presentation to the Young Entrepreneurs club.

He was watching her now with a certain curiosity. Trying to read her.

“But . . . I’ll admit I can use some general contracting work in the house . . .”

“Some general contracting? You don’t need a thesaurus. You need a dictionary.”

“. . . and since you’re about as general as a contractor can get, and you’re always underfoot anyway, I would appreciate it if you’d undertake some of the work. I want to get it all done by the first of the year.”

He smiled slowly at this.

“Same terms as your groundskeeping contract,” she added quickly.

“Ha. Nice try. Not if I’m doing more work.”

Ava actually loved to negotiate. Mac turned out to be startlingly nimble at it, too. Must be in the genes, she thought. Wasn’t that basically what his dad had done? Make deal after deal after deal? Right up until that deal with the prosecutor for a decade less jail time?

They happily bickered for a few minutes and arrived on a deal that was pretty much what she’d intended to pay him all along. If a little more.

“I’ll get a contract drawn up by tomorrow morning,” she said.

“Okay. Have you made a list of things you think need repairs or updating?”

“Of course.”

He smiled at that. “Can you email it to me tonight? I’ll add my two cents, then I’ll work out budget estimates and a schedule and we can make decisions based on that from there. Shall I stop by around ten a.m.?”

Wow. The efficiency was as breathtaking as his abs and nearly as erotic as what they’d just done on the barge couch.

“Sounds good.”

At the rate all of this professionalism was going, next they’d be exchanging business cards and a brisk, pumping handshake. She supposed she was relieved.

There ensued an uncertain little silence.

“You can keep the hummus,” he said.

The word hummus, Avalon thought, would be evocative from now on. Another of those jolts. A reminder that prior to this conversation, they’d said things to each other like “oh God Oh God” and “Avalon . . . please . . . have mercy, for fuck’s sake.”

“Thanks,” she said simply.

They regarded each other for another odd, indecisive moment.

“Okay then,” he said. “Thank you . . . good night.”

He gave her a chummy little shoulder punch, for all the world as if she were Morton Horton.

And let himself out.

“Hey, buddy.”

The Cat emerged from the shrubbery near the front door and then fell into a long-legged stride beside him like a Labrador. Funny, he had a cat who acted like a dog, and Ava had a dog who might as well be a cat.

And as he walked back to his house, Mac mulled whether he felt rejected. He kind of did.

Technically he had been, but it was also on the heels of the best sex he could remember having, which was reason alone to celebrate the evening. He had a hunch that the rejection might actually have something to do with him, and not Corbin.

And whatever had gone down all those years ago. Why she’d disappeared.

But he was thoughtful. He definitely wanted that to happen again.

What he wanted was for Ava to get what she wanted. And somehow, he knew better than anyone precisely what that was. And it wasn’t only a little space.

She wanted a choice. She wanted something to go right in her world. She wanted, in fact, to restore her world to rightness, whether she really understood that or not.

He knew how easy it would be to seduce her again. He in fact was cocky enough to believe that he could go right back in there and do it again; casually loop his arms around her, lay a kiss against her warm, soft neck, and in seconds they’d have a conflagration on their hands. She wanted him; he wanted her. That wasn’t going to go away.

But that wasn’t how he wanted to do this. Any more than he’d build a bridge over shaky ground.

He’d learned patience, of a sort. He’d learned the value and safety of a step at a time.

And it was remarkable how often just doing the right thing led to getting exactly what you wanted.

And there was just the right amount of risk to keep it interesting: because doing the right thing in no way guaranteed he’d have her in his arms again.

Avalon chucked the just-washed lasagna tin into the recycling bin and dried the forks thoroughly, as if she was wiping away DNA evidence when she actually kind of wanted to frame them: Our First Lasagna.

Mainly because she was postponing the thing she needed to do.

She sat down at the table, put her phone in the middle of it, and stared down.

But somehow pressing that one speed-dial button was as emotionally fraught as punching in the nuclear codes.

“Avalon. Oh my God . . . honey . . . thank you for calling. Are you okay?”

Honey was a weird word for Corbin. He normally would have dismissed it as very regressive. Corbin was full of that sort of exhausting bullshit.

Whereas when Mac had said it to her when she was stuck in the attic, somehow that dumb little word sounded like a promise that everything would be all right in the world.

But Corbin did sound worried and relieved.

“I’m fine.” A little sore between the legs after riding my groundskeeper, otherwise fine.

There was a little silence. She didn’t ask him how he was. She was quiet for long enough for him to realize she wasn’t going to ask.

“Corbin, I just called to say I’ll be away from the office through the beginning of the year.”

That was the first time she’d given herself a hard deadline like that.

He was silent for a moment. Astounded, if she had to guess. “That’s—that’s—about a month and a half away.”

“Very good. And to think there was a time I didn’t think you knew how to use a calendar.”

From the beginning, he was late to dates with her and sometimes forgot them altogether. She was so starry-eyed back then that she wrote it off as all part of him being a brilliant, absentminded eccentric because he’d gone to Dartmouth. He’d coasted on allowing her to feel that way, too.

But she had created something out of nothing. Funny how Mac had called her magical, when it was precisely how she’d once thought of him, too. And her something out of nothing kept an apartment roof over Corbin’s head.

Corbin just took all of that for granted.

“You’ll be back at work in San Francisco after that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.”

Silence.

She savored the texture of his silence, because she could almost taste his frustration.

“But what are you—”

“I bought a house.”

Her words were clipped, suddenly, like a German commandant in a movie with subtitles. She didn’t know why. Maybe because she didn’t want to accord him a particle more time than necessary.

This silence was lengthier.

“Sorry,” he said gingerly, like a man expecting to be flicked with a rubber band every time he spoke. “I thought you said you bought a house?”

“Yes. I did say that.”

Understandably, news of the purchase of a house amazed San Franciscans, given that even teeny shacks in the city were upward of a million dollars. And people did buy them for that price.

She and Corbin had once talked about saving up for one of those teeny shacks.

“You used your savings?”

“Yes.”

He was smart enough to draw conclusions about what all this meant. That’s what he was doing in the silences. He also knew they both drew on their savings in cases of emergency budget shortfalls.

“But . . . where . . . I mean . . . does that mean you’re never coming . . . it sounds like you are planning to leave San Francisco for good!”

His voice had climbed in pitch.

“I’m going to do some renovations on the house and sell it. And they should be done by the first of the year. I’ll keep a light hand on things at GradYouAte via email, but you’re going to need to be the boss. Period.”

She owned 5 percent more of the company than he did. And the company was Corbin’s sole source of income. He could argue if he wanted but that would get him nowhere.

Smart guy that he was, he’d figure this out, too. “What will I tell the staff?”

“Tell them I’m taking a leave of absence for personal reasons.”

“They’ll think you’re in rehab or something. And do you have any idea what that will do to the stock pri—”

“Then tell them I caught you fucking the intern in our bed. We’ll see how that affects the stock price.”

That shut him up cold.

“You’re going to have to continue handling everything while I’m gone,” she emphasized. Not without a certain sadistic relish.

He inhaled deeply, exhaled.

“Okay. Whatever you need.”

Damn straight, whatever she needed.

She said nothing.

And neither did he.

But neither one of them hung up just yet.

“So, Corbin . . . Are you in love with Grace?” It was really just rank curiosity. She needed some context for the destruction of her previous life.

Silence.

“What?” He was purely astounded. “Why on earth would . . . Good God, NO!”

Suddenly a little red screen of rage appeared before her eyes.

“Silly me, imagining you’d bang someone out of love rather than random impulse and opportunity. You know, the way you always grab a handful of M&Ms off the receptionist desk. Because they’re there.”

“That’s not why I . . .” He stopped.

“Then wh . . .”

Did she really want to know why? Would it matter at this point? Would it change who he was or who she was or what he’d done?

She couldn’t get the word out of her mouth.

She could hear him breathing. She knew that sound well. It was somehow peculiarly comforting in its familiarity, and yet she couldn’t help fantasizing about covering his face with a pillow.

“You and I haven’t had sex in almost two months,” he said carefully. His voice lowered as if they were in danger of being overheard.

She waited for more.

But nope, that was apparently it.

“Wow. Two months? It’s a wonder your dick didn’t dry up and blow away. Good thing you found some place to stash it before that happened.”

“Jesus, Ava!” He said it faintly. Genuinely shocked.

Which was funny because that wasn’t even remotely representative of how mean she felt or how mean she thought she could be.

But . . . had it really been two months? Somehow she hadn’t missed it.

Or . . .

Had she avoided it?

Something that might have been a twinge of guilt pinged inside her.

“I mean . . . you couldn’t just discreetly . . . self-pleasure . . . in front of some internet porn, Corbin? Wouldn’t that have been simpler?”

She had never participated in a more excruciating conversation. They didn’t know how to fight with each other. Because they never really did. They exchanged pissy remarks now and again, sure. And there had been relationship calibration type things when they first moved in together: Corbin needed to learn to put the lid down on the toilet seat. (She’d framed it in the form of a logic question: “It’s a lid, Corbin. When things have lids, typically you put them back after you use them, right? You know, like jam and shampoo.”) For some reason she never closed cupboards all the way; it maddened him. So she’d learned to do it.

“It’s not the same, is it?” Corbin was struggling with words that weren’t glib, and that’s when she realized the two of them just didn’t have a vocabulary for this disaster. “Wanking to porn. We’re both so busy. We only ever talk about work lately. I felt like . . . we were growing apart. I was lonely.”

And that faintly bewildered yet entitled tone in which he issued the word lonely . . . that summed Corbin up right there. It was somehow inconceivable to him that any need he had wouldn’t be comfortably met.

“Lonely? We saw each other every freaking day!”

“But we were both just so busy . . . it was all work. We’d just fall into bed at night and get up and do it again. I was lonely and I have my needs, for God’s sake. I just—”

She closed her eyes. “OH MY GOD. Corbin. STOP. Just STOP. STOP. Saying. Stupid. Things. STOP.”

The tone made him wary, clearly, because he did shut up for a second or two.

“And by stupid, could you be more spec—”

“Your stupid answer to my question and stupid to use our bed and stupid, stupid, stupid to do our intern. Stupid and boring and careless—and—and—lazy! It’s like that time you just stood there in front of the refrigerator and ate three pickles out of the jar because you couldn’t be bothered to peel back the plastic on one of the Lean Cuisines and put it in the microwave. She is literally the first woman you see every day. After me, of course.”

“I was horny and lonely and she came on to me, Ava. You should have seen how aggressi—”

“ARRRRRRRRRRGH!”

She roared right into the phone. She hoped his eardrum shriveled at that onslaught.

She couldn’t bear to hear him blame Grace because that just made him an even bigger chickenshit. And what did that say about her and her judgment to align her fates with such a feckless chickenshit? And sure, Grace was appallingly feckless, too, natch, but she was only twenty-two and was clearly about to learn the hard way about life and men and jobs and that whole lot. She had a few decades of big mistakes ahead of her, probably. Avalon did not give one crap about Grace.

Well, except:

“She wasn’t hurt, was she? When she fell off the bed?”

“No,” he said sullenly. “You were right about the rug pad.”

They did have a pretty thick carpet in there.

Stupid, but that little thing right there: the carpet pad. Romance was all well and good, but lives were knit together by little things, decisions about whether to put extra padding under the rugs.

“Corbin, you literally almost never stop talking unless you’re sleeping, and you couldn’t have said something, anything to me about feeling horny or unhappy or lonely? Seriously, is that what you’re telling me? This is the whole of your rationale? Your first impulse was to betray me in the biggest, most cliché way possible, because, and I quote, you were ‘lonely’?”

The word betray felt melodramatic in her mouth. Formal, almost medieval, like cuckold.

Corbin had his Dartmouth degree. But he’d been a spoiled child and Avalon had always been a better arguer. If you had siblings, especially wily, smart ones like she had, you learned how to fight and fight hard.

Corbin apparently didn’t know how to respond. There was just more of that breathing, this time a little halting.

He was trying not to cry.

She had never once witnessed him crying.

Oh, hell. Despite it all, she couldn’t bear the idea of making him cry.

“Nothing is the same without you,” he said finally. His voice was frayed and hollow.

“DUH.”

Somehow it was the perfect word: infantile, monosyllabic.

But her voice broke.

Corbin misinterpreted the crack as an opening for him.

“I miss you, Ava.”

He sounded wholly miserable and lost and . . .

And just a little bit wheedling.

The miserable and lost bit . . . well, that was her wheelhouse, wasn’t it? She could bear her own suffering, but somehow not the suffering of people she cared about. She had to swat back the traitorous reflex to comfort him. He’d done this to himself.

Did one, albeit horrible, act laser love away completely? Just zap it gone, scorched earth and all that?

Or had she truly, really, ever loved him?

She knew one thing for certain: somewhere in the wheedling was the guy who was still sure he could get his way by somehow charming her into it. And that alone told her he had no clue, no clue of the enormity of what he’d done to her.

Mac had been the spoiled son of a billionaire, but she couldn’t in a million years picture Mac . . . whining. His life had fallen apart, publicly and horribly, and he’d rebuilt it bit by bit, from the ground up, the hard way. There hadn’t been a shred of self-pity in what he’d told her about the national guard, but God knows he was entitled to some.

So there were a dozen things she could say to Corbin right now. What she said was, “I don’t miss you. We’re over. For good.”

She pressed the red button and ended the call without another word. And dropped the phone.

She looked out the window. She knew a minute twinge of guilt, because somewhere in there was a sort of acknowledgement: she might well be responsible for the distance between her and Corbin.

She might even have sort of noticed, and . . . she might not have minded.

The hum of Mac’s lovemaking hadn’t even left her body. Absently, she touched her lips, still tender, and dragged her hand around to the back of her neck.

She was pretty sure that if she hadn’t had sex in two months, it wasn’t because the two of them were busy.

It could be because she’d stopped wanting it with Corbin.

She yearned for comfort right now and there wasn’t a soul she could call about this, but a reflex made her stand up and turn toward the window.

She couldn’t see the light on in Mac’s house. But that sure wasn’t the direction of safety or certainty, either.

She curled up on the bargelike sex sofa, and for the first time in possibly years, she had a good, long, weary, frustrated, sick-of-herself cry, while Chick Pea propped herself on her knees and licked her cheeks.