Avalon found Corbin sitting on the bargelike sofa petting Chick Pea, who was Buddha-like in her loving acceptance of all mankind, even cheating jerks.

“You got a dog?” he asked.

As the proper response to this was also “Duh” she said, “You couldn’t find the front door? You had to creep around the freaking house? What the hell are you even doing here?”

“There aren’t any lights out here. I mean, any. Almost didn’t find the driveway.”

“We’re still installing the perimeter lighting.”

A beat of silence. “We’re?”

“Yes. You met my contractor.”

“Big Guns out there? In more ways than one? Boy, for a Coltrane, he’s sure come down in the world, huh?”

She leveled an amazed look at him, a look that contained such withering incredulity and scorn he dropped his eyes and began rubbing a nonexistent spot on his jeans.

Chick Pea moved over to lean against Avalon.

“Rented a car. A Prius.”

She said nothing. Though that could explain why they hadn’t heard him drive up. Priuses tended to move on little cat feet, to paraphrase a famous poem about fog.

“Lots of stars out here, though. Wow. Can’t see them in San Francisco with all the lights,” he added.

This was the kind of inane small talk two people who had never before met would struggle through until the bus arrived or someone they actually knew showed up at the same party.

If one of them had a pronounced hostile bias toward the other, that was.

She didn’t reply to that, either.

She was still thinking of Mac out there, standing in his underwear and pointing a gun at Corbin as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Mac had been on watch somehow. That was his instinct. All I want is for you to be safe.

She drew in a shuddering breath. Her eyes burned.

“Avalon . . . that guy out there . . .”

She shot him another granite look. Daring him to ask some kind of question he had zero right to ask. She was in no mood to indulge guys tonight.

“Knows his way around a shotgun? Yes. Yes, he does.”

He dropped it. He heaved a sigh. He looked around the place.

“This is that sofa from your parents’ basement, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Mentioning the sofa, remembering it, was a crafty little move. Because it linked them to their shared history: two Thanksgivings ago, hanging out in her parents’ basement with her siblings, playing Nintendo, drinking beer, and laughing.

All it did was make her sad, and the sadness swelled and morphed into fury, which flatlined into nothing but a wish for him to leave.

“This house is amazing. I can see why you snapped it up. I just roamed the downstairs a little. I had no idea there were houses like this out here.”

“Yes.” She was instantly protective of it. She did not like the idea of Corbin roaming around, assessing things.

“I talked to Rachel Nguyen. She was looking for a conference center property in the North State.”

“I know. She’s one of my best friends, Corbin, for God’s sake.”

He nodded shortly. He leaned back a little, as if to get a wider-angle look on her.

“Avalon, I have to say . . . you look . . . you look . . . beautiful.”

He said it with great sincerity and the faintest surprise. He almost sounded a little affronted. Not as though he was just now remembering that he’d once had a beautiful girlfriend.

But sort of as if he’d expected her to have wasted away from heartbreak.

She scowled at him.

And she was going to be silent long enough for him to realize he wasn’t going to get a reciprocal compliment.

He looked fine. He looked the same as always. He should look like shit, thin from not eating with purple sleepless guilt shadows under his eyes. Maybe his hair should be a little thinner, since he had a tendency to tug on it when he was anxious.

Her diaphragm felt tight. It occurred to her that she was breathing shallowly. As if she begrudged the necessity to breathe the same air he was currently breathing.

He picked absently at the corner of the sofa cushion where it was already coming unraveled.

“I’m sorry to just show up like this. I would have told you I was coming up, but you would have told me not to.”

“Corbin, I’d like to sleep. I’ve been working all day, actual physical labor. If you have something else to say, for fuck’s sake, say it.”

“I did something horrible,” he blurted.

Oh, God.

“Are we referencing the horrible thing you did that led to my being here, or have you done a brand-new horrible thing affecting GradYouAte?”

She said this with utter dispassion and calm neutrality.

It badly rattled him, she could tell. Whatever his strategy was for coming up here, or whatever message he intended to deliver, it apparently depended on her giving a shit about him.

He drew in a breath.

“The first one,” he said. With a ghost of humor, an attempt at his usual glib self. “But I’m here for two reasons. So I’m just going to talk business first. Because you wouldn’t talk to me, and this requires your input. It’s pretty critical.”

Oh, crap. Concern twinged, and then the weight of that life she’d created almost without meaning to, a life with people who depended on her for their salaries, came and WHUMP—settled on her shoulders. She hadn’t fully been aware of how much of a weight it in fact was until she’d managed, for at least a few weeks, to shift out from under it.

“The football tryout mod for GradYouAte is way behind schedule because two of the key programmers were deported to Canada for not renewing their work visas on time.”

She knew what the cascade effect of that would be. Advertisers, subscribers. They’d shed them accordingly, and lose a huge chunk of income.

“Corbin . . . I told you to make sure everything is in order with their working visas! Twice! And you know you’re supposed to review all that before hiring decisions are made. You know that but I made a freaking point of reminding you!”

“But there are so many teams working on so many things. And I usually just do the programming and interviewing.”

She could feel tension like a noose around her forehead. “Yes, you do. While I do approximately a billion other fucking things. You know that about the teams, too. And if I can do all that, so can you. Unless you’re saying I’m smarter and more capable than you are.”

This was something she never would have dared voice aloud to him before. Part of the dynamic of their relationship had been the understanding that he was the brilliant one while she was the sparkly cute one who made it possible for him to be brilliant.

She wondered for one wild moment if he’d done this on purpose. So she’d have to come back and fix it.

“And I guess I’ve been feeling a little distracted by . . . what happened with us.”

She stared at him. “By ‘what happened’? You mean when I walked in on you mid-bang?”

He sucked in a sharp breath and continued. “There’s more. The new programmers hired won’t work for anything less than a hundred an hour. So it’s either a hundred an hour, or a further delay in the rollout. And there’s more trouble with the art for the cheerleader module. You know how we discussed the need for multicultural avatars and we had to have them redone? Well, they’re of all ethnicities now. But turns out what they turned in and began implementing . . . well, all the cheerleaders look like this.”

He made the universal gesture indicating giant bosoms.

Oh, good God. They would need to be redrawn to reflect the range of bosoms really possible in the real world.

“Anyway. The way it stands now, we can redirect the ad spend for the football module, but in light of all this stuff, and to make a long story short, we still might not make office rent. Or meet all of payroll. So pick your favorite employee and they’ll get paid. Ha ha ha.”

She couldn’t speak for a moment.

“Jesus, Corbin!”

“You know I’m not good with the money decisions.” There was a whiff of passive-aggressive accusation here.

“What you actually mean is that you don’t like to make the money decisions. You know that’s not a reason to abdicate responsibility, right? ‘I don’t want to?’ You know those aren’t magic words, right?”

But she’d said this same thing to him in ways both pissy and diplomatic over the years. And in years past she’d made excuses to herself for him. “There are actual people depending on you.”

Her mind was spinning. They’d had these kinds of blips once or twice early on, where the delicate balance of income and outflow had gotten away from them, where some surprise or snafu had resulted in them coming up short. They’d dip into their own earnings or savings to handle it; they’d foregone salaries for a few months more than once. They hadn’t had an issue like this in ages.

They sat in silence, Avalon seething. Because he’d come all the way up here to force her to solve the problems he could have easily prevented.

And she was mad at herself, too. She’d needed time away and to prove a point to Corbin. So she’d left him in charge, which shouldn’t have led to anything like a disaster. She’d figured he’d rise to the challenge or . . .

. . . he’d do exactly what he ended up doing. Which was fucking everything up.

Now she’d need to go back into town and handle things from there. And she’d need to come up with money for payroll, because damned if she would let any of her staff go without a paycheck. Go hat in hand to their current investors?

She needed to sell this house as soon as possible.

She was absolutely silent. Resentfully, despairingly absorbing all of this. Already working on a solution.

“I wish . . . wish I did have magic words,” he blurted suddenly. Sounding wretched.

“What?” she said. It felt like a non-sequitur.

“To . . . undo what I did to you.”

She stared at him. Astonished.

He reached for her hand.

She slid it out of the way in time.

“Because . . . when I see you . . . I see this beautiful, funny, confident woman I’ve loved for four years . . . and I oh, God, just want to make it better. I want to turn back time.”

Some part of her was amused by the specificity of this. They’d been dating for five years.

“Yeah, but you can’t.” That was pretty brutal, but it was exactly how she felt.

He took a long, deep breath. “I know what I did was pretty unforgivable and . . . if I could take it back I would, believe me. We clearly have a few issues. I was hoping we could go to counseling, work something out, find a way to be together.”

He had to be joking.

She stared at him wonderingly. For so long, she could see that he’d begun to hope.

“The problem, Corbin, is that when I look at you . . .” she said slowly, “I see an ass.”

His eyes flared in split-second outrage. He drew in a long breath through his nostrils, and exhaled. Then he nodded rapidly in agreement. “Okay. I know. I know. I deserve that. I have been an ass. I was just hoping we could talk about how it—”

“No.” She leaned forward, her hands clasped between her knees, and said earnestly and slowly, explaining it as if it were a compelling abstract concept that he might find fascinating, “An actual ass, Corbin. I actually see your white ass bobbing up and down between two sets of ten sparkly orange toenails. That’s what I see when I look at you. An ass. That is what I’ll always see when I look at you. From now on. Forever.”

She let that ring in silence.

“And I can’t go to counseling with an ass,” she explained gently. “I’m sure you see the problem.”

His face went a wash of different shades of red, then white again.

She had a hunch he was finally getting it. Because, God help her, she saw his eyes begin to shine with genuine tears.

“I love you, you know,” he said.

She sighed, closed her eyes briefly, opened them again. “Maybe you do. But when I said we were done, I meant it. Full stop. Please do not ask me about it again.”

He was motionless.

Pity stirred, because despite it all, there was some part of her that always ached for people and their foibles and their weaknesses, even when those weaknesses ended up hurting her.

Mac was in that category.

All she knew was that love was more than whatever she’d had with Corbin. She thought of her parents, and she thought of Morty and Helen Horton strolling along together, and she thought of Mac.

Mac, who even if he couldn’t commit to another human, even if he was poised to run away from her, somehow hadn’t thought twice about putting her safety above his.

Then again, at least Corbin could get those three terrifying words out. So she guessed he had that going for him.

Maybe the next lucky fool he dated would get to hear them, too.

He sighed bleakly. “Can I . . . at least stay here tonight? I’ll sleep on this sofa. It was three and a half hours between San Francisco and here.”

“Are you kidding me? There’s a motel on I-5 about an hour from here. You’re not going to want to stay at the one nearest here. It’s pretty sketchy. You can try calling the Angel’s Nest but they’re already full up and Rosemary and her husband work hard so I personally wouldn’t be happy about you waking them up.”

“Are you seriously kicking me out at three in the morning? I’ve . . . I’ve driven three and a half hours to get here.”

“Are you seriously whining right now? Do I need to call Mac and have him march you out of here? Jesus, Corbin. Have some fucking pride.”

She stared him down.

In a huff, he collected his Man Bag and turned around and stalked out.

She locked the door. She watched out the window to make sure he was gone.

And then she watched a little longer just to be on the safe side.

And then a little longer after that.

Even though she had a hunch Mac was watching, too. Whether he wanted to or not. It was just who he was.

While all this was going down, Mac lay as rigid as a board against his scratchy sheets. He felt pinned in place by that faint bar of light thrown down across his torso. But he was as wired as if he’d bolted a six-pack of Red Bull.

The lights were still on out there. Maybe that meant they were still awake.

Maybe they were having a reunion hump.

He flung an arm over his face as if the thought was an assault. He’d consigned the coconut pillow to a far corner of the bed.

In the deepest heart of him, he actually didn’t think that would happen. Avalon was stubborn as hell, she had a lot of pride, and everything she felt went deep. She wasn’t going to just cave.

And he, thank you very much, was very good in the sack. No woman wanted to eat a sensible main course, say, a steamed chicken breast, after a decadent flaming dessert.

He smiled sardonically at his own attempt at bravado.

Nevertheless.

He was worried. That spoiled twit had been horrible to her but he’d woken up next to her for the last four or five years. He was worried because even though Corbin didn’t strike him as any kind of romantic hero—which was the kind of guy he had a hunch Avalon would hold out for—or even be worth fighting for, there was no accounting for the mystery of chemistry. Or history. History definitely exerted its own gravity.

Until tonight, he’d had those things in his favor with her—chemistry and history.

Until tonight, he hadn’t even thought of the day after tomorrow.

Until tonight, “Corbin” had felt like something theoretical that didn’t need to be addressed unless via sardonic jokes.

And Mac was man enough to own up to the fact that “spoiled twit” had once described him, too.

He imagined himself crawling out of bed to stand beneath her balcony and falling to his knees and bellowing, “AVALON!” like Stanley Kowalski. He kind of understood the impulse now.

He just didn’t know what he would say after that.

Making his way out to Avalon’s balcony in fact seemed as possible as a mummy creaking its way out of a sarcophagus.

He’d successfully jettisoned everything that threatened to chain him in or make him uncomfortable or prevent him from moving precisely the way he wanted to.

And then he’d rebuilt himself from the ground up.

And he was free! He liked being free.

The light at the house went out.

And the bands across his stomach tightened, and something very like pain, but also very like fury, took up residence and burned in his chest in the vicinity of his heart.

He didn’t actually need anyone, and that was indeed the definition of freedom.

The Cat, in his infinite wisdom, begged to differ, and jumped up and curled in the crook of Mac’s arm.