My question about the father of my baby echoes in the air.

Grace opens her mouth…right before her face crumples into tears, like a mask that suddenly starts to melt.

“Grace!” I say, alarmed. I’ve never seen her cry before—not even when we were both toddlers. “What’s wrong?”

Grace shakes her head. “I told them I would take care of you!” she answers. “When my dad and your dad called me after you decided to move here, I told them to zen. I mean, Kansas is so boring and I honestly thought Uncle Lex had nothing to worry about. Between your martial arts skills and mine, I didn’t think there was anything that could hurt you here. But I was wrong and I failed you.”

“Are you kidding?” I ask, aghast. Not because she’d talked about me with my dad behind my back, but because: “It’s not your job to take care of me, and it wasn’t fair of our fathers to put you in that position to begin with!”

She sniffed. “Of course, you would say that. But I saw all the warning signs and kept ignoring them. First, I let you go off with that guy at the club.”

I blinked. “What guy? What club?”

“I don’t know who he was!” she all but wailed, her voice full of self-recrimination. “If it had been my father, he would have vetted him seven different ways before letting him talk to you. But you seemed to know him and you gave me a back off signal when I tried to approach. At first, I thought you were using him to get out of talking to Ethan, but then it looked like you were having a really good time. So when you decided to go home with him, I was like ‘why not? Let her blow off some steam for once.’”

I shake my head. “I don’t understand. You’re saying I met some random guy at a club and then went back to his place? Where does he live?”

Grace shakes her head. “I don’t know. Some place on the other side of the district. You came back the next morning and told Spidey and me over brunch that he lived in an itty-bitty studio but had a super long dick—no surgery. Then you said even though it was supposed to be a one night stand, you two decided to become sex buddies.”

I stop her right there with a raised hand, because that doesn’t sound like me. At all. “Are you trying to say I, Layla Rustanov, became sex buddies with a random guy I sort of knew from a club?”

Grace grimaces and reluctantly nods. “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. And here I thought my tattoos were bad ass. I guess when you decided to rebel, you wanted to go big.”

I shake my head again. Unable to believe a word she’s saying. “Was he handsome?”

“Yeah, I guess he was technically pretty,” Grace answers after a moment of consideration. “If you like pretty paired with a thuggish aesthetic, which I didn’t think you of all people would. But you stayed sex buddies for, like, months.”

More blinking from me because I really can’t see myself agreeing to a one-night stand, much less an ongoing sexual relationship, with a pretty-but-thuggish stranger.

“And I never told you his name?”

Now it’s her turn to shake her head. “No, you just called him Buddy…as in…”

“There’s no need to clarify, I get it,” I say, my brain working overtime to process everything she’s just told me.

“In all seriousness, the whole ‘relationship’ seemed kind of like a big joke to you. I mean you guys saw a lot of each other because you said he was really good in bed. But you never talked about him. This new guy…he seemed to be nothing more than a diversion. And you were on the device so I figured you were safe.”

But the device had failed. And apparently, it most likely had failed with some random guy I met in a club and decided to go totally off-brand with.

“Were we still…” I pause because ‘together’ seems like the wrong word to use for whatever it is I was doing with this man, “…seeing each other when I had my accident?”

With a kind of culinary sixth sense, Grace seems to know the exact moment to remove the pot of boiling pasta from the burner.

“Not that I could tell,” she answers as she drains the noodles. “I think you guys got into a fight about a week before your accident. A big one. You told me you’d be spending Friday night at Buddy’s. But then around eight or so, you came home. And you didn’t want to talk about why you hadn’t stayed over…just went straight to your room where you spent most of the weekend, crying. I was really worried. It got to where I was going to cancel my plans to visit my parents for summer break. But you told me not to. Said you had to go to work on Monday anyway.”

Grace returns to the counter and it looks like she’s about to cry again. “But I shouldn’t have listened to you. I should have followed my instincts and tracked down the guy who made you cry.”

“No, Grace,” I shake my head and take her hand. “Please…you have to stop blaming yourself. There’s nothing you could have done. And I can take care of myself. You know that.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.” She raises apologetic wet eyes to mine. “But less than a week later, a group of hunters found you washed up on the banks of that river.”