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whistle through the air and then there was a sound I’d never forget, both alien and horribly intimate: bones breaking. The man’s scream hurt my ears. Then it became muffled and I figured my dad must have stuffed something in his mouth to shut him up.
    Another cracking noise. Another. Another. Muffled moaning. The noises started to sound wet. I could have turned on the radio or put my hands over my ears, but I knew by then, at sixteen, that either of those would make my dad turn his anger on me. So I sat there like a little statue and stared at the dashboard as if it was the best book I’d ever read.
    The moaning grew weaker. Eventually, it stopped altogether.
    That nightmare was one of the worst, because the sound followed me around afterwards. I’d be walking along with Karen, the morning after, and I’d still hear that wet crack of bone echoing in my ears. I always had to pretend that I had a stomach bug, because I felt too sick to eat.
    And then, of course, there were the two worst nightmares of all. The reruns of the two worst nights of my life.
    The nightmare I’d had that morning hadn’t been anything like as bad as one of those. It wasn’t even anything that had happened to me, as such.
    In the nightmare, one of the customers in our bar, a pimp, was sitting there with one of his hookers, a blonde called Hayley. I was cleaning glasses, trying to keep a low profile. My dad sauntered over there, drunk as usual, and he said something I couldn’t hear, a crude come-on. Hayley, I figured, didn’t realize that her pimp owed my dad money, and didn’t know what my dad was like. So she told him where to go.
    The pimp back-handed her. And then, apologized to my dad and encouraged him to do the same. Between them, they split Hayley’s lip open.
    A few minutes later, I saw her going into the restroom. I knew there was nothing in there you’d want to put remotely near a wound, so I got some clean kitchen towel and soaked it in cold water and handed it to her when she came out. I expected her to be grateful.
    But she just glared at me. “I don’t need your fucking pity,” she snapped. “You think you’re better than me? You’ll be just like me! I’m your future!”
    I’d woken with those words echoing around and around in my head and the sheets soaked through with sweat. I’d had to lie there for ten minutes before I felt strong enough to move, before I’d fully reassured myself that I’d escaped, that I was in New York now. That was why I was running late.
    I looked in the refrigerator, just in case I’d had a complete brain-melt and put the shoes in there. Nope. I slumped down on the bed, defeated. And immediately jumped up again as a heel dug into my ass. The bed?! What was my shoe doing in the bed?!
    I strapped it on. Time was, it would have been there because I’d invited some hot guy back to my place and kept my shoes on while we worked through the juicier parts of the Kama Sutra. In the last month, though, I just hadn’t been able to face it. And that was a problem, because if I didn’t keep shoring up Jasmine by living like she would, a void formed in my center, sucking everything down into it. And once everything was gone, all that would be left would be Emma.
    Something else was different, too. Since Ryan and Hux had blipped their siren and talked to me, a month before, I hadn’t seen them. Maybe it worked, I thought. Maybe he finally lost interest and moved on to someone who deserves him.
    Maybe. And if so, that was a good thing, right? So why did I keep looking over my shoulder every Thursday, not in trepidation but in hope? Why had I strolled from Fenbrook to Harper’s three times, last Thursday, eyes scanning both ends of the street? Why did I dream of him almost every night: Ryan pulling me into his patrol car and pushing me down on the back seat, his muscled thigh between my legs; Ryan in my bed, my legs wrapped around him, his mouth at my ear as he told me what he wanted; most