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Twenty-seventh in Carol City, where they serve biscuits and gravy, sausage, baked chicken, and this fabulous peach cobbler. I’d decided to make a clean confession.
    “You always play the money card.”
    “Em, I love you. You know that. And I’m always amazed that you reciprocate, but there is a money issue.”
    “It’s not important to me.” She pursed her lips and closed her beautiful blue eyes for several seconds.
    “Because you have a lot of money and I don’t have any.” My father had abandoned the family when I was very young, and my mother, younger sister, and I lived off welfare for about as long as I can remember. Em’s father owned a huge constructioncompany, and he’d made a boatload of money off the wealthy homeowners in the richest districts of Miami.
    “Just because I work for my father—”
    The argument came up once in a while. About every other day.
    “So what exactly are your obligations?”
    “I pretend we’re dating. Sarah and I. At the job site. And, I park my car in front of her condo three nights a week.”
    “You don’t park yourself at her condo?”
    “Come on, Em.”
    “This lasts how long?” I could see her softening, the fire leaving her eyes, and her fist opening into a five-fingered hand.
    “Until we’re done.”
    “Which is when?”
    We’d be done in four or five days. The Sarah thing should be done at the end of the month. “Three, four weeks tops. Em, I’m not interested in her. It just seemed so innocent, and—”
    “You’re helping Sarah destroy a marriage. You’re helping her break up this Sandler Conroy and his wife. Am I right?”
    “Well, I think the marriage—”
    “Am I right?”
    “Yes.” How could I argue that point.
    “How did she ever get involved with this guy?”
    I said I was making a clean confession. That isn’t exactly true. I was leaving out a certain part of the story. I figured that Em would buy most of the story. The hooker part, I wasn’t so sure about. “Dating service. Once she found out he was married, it was too late. She was hooked.”
    “Skip,” she looked into my eyes, and I knew she was going to agree, “you fall into some of the strangest situations.”
    “Em. Let me finally break even. I’m going to make over twenty thousand dollars. Do you realize that I’ve never had that much money at one time in my life?”
    She nodded. This beautiful, sexy woman who probably made over $100,000 a year, she got it. She couldn’t argue with me. I knew it.
    “So I’ve got to pretend that you’re dating someone else?”
    “No. It’s a couple, three weeks, Em. That’s all. And it stays inside the company.”
    We both still had a full plate of food. I thought that confiding in Em would make me feel better. Instead, a partial confession only made me feel worse. I could feel a burning in my stomach, and I couldn’t touch another bite of food.
    “I’m not happy about it, Skip.”
    “I didn’t expect you would be.”
    “What if I told you I’d leave you because of this?”
    “Would you?”
    She sipped on her glass of water.
    One of the servers stepped out from behind the buffet counter and headed toward the restroom. He turned to look at Em. A lot of guys do. As he turned and stared, he slid on a spot of grease and fell hard on the tile floor. Em never even noticed, and I immediately thought to myself, a lot of people had taken a fall for Emily. She just shrugged it off.
    “Well, would you? Leave me?”
    The server picked himself up, made a point of looking the other way, and continued toward the restroom.
    “I should.”
    “Don’t.”
    She slid out of the booth and stood up. “I won’t.”
    I let out the breath that I’d been holding.
    “But this stays at Synco Systems, right?”
    “It does.” My cell phone rang, “Born in the U.S.A.” blaring from the little black box.
    “Hello.”
    “Skip Moore?”
    I couldn’t place the voice, and I didn’t recognize the phone number.
    “Yes?”
    “You represent the