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you.”
    ‘Happy’ is the wrong word to describe what I’m feeling. ‘Content’ doesn’t seem to fit either. I’m guilt-ridden, confused, and anxious.
    I’m always some degree of anxious. Anxious that what Gilda told me was right, that this is just the beginning, That Neal is carefully spinning a web, like my father did with all of his wives, and I’m willfully entangling myself with his deceptions.
    “I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” I say, my fingers digging into my arms.
    Neal steps closer. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
    Don’t kiss him! The warning lights up in my brain, large and blinding but Neal’s too close. He pushes my hair behind my ear, exposing the small diamond stud, his thumb caressing my cheek as he tilts his head and kisses me.
    His lips are soft against mine, his fingers threading in my hair as my hands find his shoulders. Our toes press together as he deepens the kiss, one arm thrown around my waist as I give into him. Wholly and completely.
    Across the street someone whistles. We break apart and spot a small group of drunken college students, cheering us on with whoops and hollers, arms fist-pumping the air.
    I bury my face in his neck, biting back a smile.
    Neal says, “Come on.” He laces his fingers with mine. “Let’s head upstairs.”
    The door’s locked. Neal knocks and I stand a little taller, my back pressed against the opposite wall, standing as far away without looking too off. I’m not quite ready to enter my father’s condo, not without the crowds of sympathetic mourners or the thick smell of alcohol wafting through the air. I need the bartenders with their pop-up bar and the caterers with their mountain of food. I need the waiters and waitresses and cigarette buds littering the patio. I need something to detach me from my memories of it.
    Ashleigh opens the door and Neal steps inside. His hand lingers on the knob as he throws a look over his shoulder.
    “Are you coming?” he asks.
    “In a minute.”
    His eyebrows knit in the middle but he doesn’t say anything. He kicks off his shoes in the foyer, right foot, then the left, his socks as black as his suit. My father used to do the same, his toes expertly peeling his shoes from his feet before he checked the bottom for dirt and grime. “I gotta get these cleaned,” he would mutter to himself.
    He was a freak about keeping the cream carpet spotless. No food was allowed anywhere but the kitchen and his bedroom. I ate many meals propped up at the counter, watching him in the living room with Gina or Darlene, explaining the current financial market the way one would explain physics to a child. I was always waiting for him to pat them on the head, an overt display of patronization, but they did it to themselves. The pair of them unknowingly spitting out the same line years apart: “I’m too pretty to worry about things like this.”
    I take off my heels in the hall and place them next to Neal’s shoes. There’s no carpet to worry about now, it’s all wood floor, but it’s an instinctual act.
    Chris and Ashleigh are in the living room, Chris laying across the couch with his shoes pressing into the cushion.
    “Can you not?” I say, leaning against the kitchen counter.
    Chris raises an eyebrow.
    “Your feet. Get them off the couch.”
    A streak of defiance rushes through him, the same that occasionally runs through me. Our eyes meet and he digs his heels deeper into the cushion, a mischievous smirk spreading across his mouth.
    “Get them off,” Neal barks from the short bookcase in the corner. Chris immediately complies. Good boy .
    Ashleigh’s near the record player, barefoot and bouncing on her heels. “David Bowie or Nancy Sinatra?” she says, throwing me a glance.
    “My dad doesn’t own any David Bowie,” I say.
    “He does,” Ashleigh says with a grin. “I got him into him.”
    She flips the record between two fingers before putting on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars