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toward the sky. From here, Lydia could watch as Kat walked out to the pool, stripped off her top and shorts, and then dove into the crystal water wearing just her black underwear. With strong, determined strokes, she cut through the water with her tennis player's arms.
    Lydia felt awful for her. But she didn't have proof. And without actual proof, she wasn't ready to have the conversation with Kat that would surely result in the destruction of her relationship, and her children losing a parent. Lydia didn't care that Kat had asked to hear about any and all suspicious activity that she saw. Proof was required.
    But … that didn't mean she had to do nothing. Right then and there, she decided that she'd have a serious talk with Anya. Tell her what she knew and what she'd seen. And tell Anya that she'd better get her shit together. Lydia knew Anya's drill. She'd get mad, she'd bluster, she'd bullshit. But Lydia didn't care. As she watched her mother's sister take out her aggression in the swimming pool, she knew that would be the right thing to do.

Before she even saw the crowd, Kiley could hear the buzz in the air. She walked across the hot pavement holding Serenity by one hand and Sid by the other. Platinum's sister Susan and her ramrod-straight husband, known to one and all as the colonel, walked four paces ahead of them. Slouching along behind them was Bruce, Platinum's fourteen-year-old son, clad in a suit jacket over a “Free Platinum” T-shirt, which he was now flashing at the crowd held back by police barricades.
    It wasn't a crowd, Kiley decided. It was a mob. One part paparazzi, two parts family-values activists, and ten parts fans obsessed as only fans in Los Angeles could be. It had gathered in front of the gleaming white stone Beverly Hills courthouse to witness the start of Platinum's trial for the reckless endangerment of her kids. The same kids who'd been exposed to and endangered by her flagrant drug use. The same kids Kiley McCann tended to daily. The same kids whose hands she was holding at that very moment.
    Then there were the drug charges. The police had found marijuana in plain sight in Platinum's living room. But drug charges were a dime a dozen in Los Angeles. It was the child endangerment that was captivating the gossip columnists and television pundits.
    Sid made himself belch as loudly as possible, over and over.
    “Stop it, Sid, you suck!” Serenity screamed.
    “Nuh-uh,
you
suck!” Sid yelled back.
    Both of them had a tendency to use bad language when they got upset or anxious.
    “It's going to be okay, you guys,” Kiley assured them, even as the paparazzi and fans recognized the kids and began snapping their pictures.
    Serenity stopped to pose, as if on the red carpet at a movie premiere. This morning she'd insisted on getting up at five a.m. It meant Kiley had to get up, too, to get ready to go to the trial. Serenity had tried on outfit after outfit, all of them better suited for an MTV music video than for a girl about to start the third grade. Kiley knew that the colonel—Serenity's uncle by marriage—would make the little girl take off said outfit as soon as he saw it. She warned Serenity that this was so. But somewhere in the world of kid logic, Serenity thought she'd be able to get away with it anyway.
    When the little girl came down for breakfast in the bright green halter top and low-slung plaid boyfriend pants that bared her navel and a good two inches of pale little-girl flesh below it, sure enough, the colonel had ordered her to turn around and march right back upstairs. She now sported a pair of khaki pants and a pale blue short-sleeved polo.
    Now, though, as Serenity posed, Kiley realized that somewhere along the way, the little girl had put on cherry red lip gloss, mascara, and blush. Up ahead, the colonel and Susan were heading into the security clearance area in front of the courthouse. He turned, saw that Kiley and the kids had stopped and that Bruce was actually signing