“Want to tell me about it?”

After rinsing, I headed back that way, still looking over the file. “That’s a negatory. But I’d like to keep that option open. You know, if I get in trouble.”

“So, you’ll be telling me all about it by tomorrow afternoon. Have you talked to your dad?”

“Negatory times two. This guy seems to be very precise in what he’s burning down. I’m assuming there’s no insurance angle?”

“Not a single one. Different owners. Different insurance companies. We can’t find a single thread connecting them.”

“Hey,” I said, thinking about the news show I’d seen. “Do you guys have any idea who those Gentlemen Thieves are? Those bank robbers?”

He perked up, clearly interested. “No, do you?”

“Darn. Not really. They just look familiar.” I glanced toward the ceiling in thought. “Like their shape. I could swear I’ve seen them somewhere.”

The door opened, and Cookie waltzed in with her twelve-year-old daughter, Amber, in tow.

“Well, if you figure it out, give me a call, okay?”

“Will do.”

Cookie offered an absent wave to Ubie, barely taking note of him. But he noticed her. Both his pulse and his interest rose. So either he was still pining over Cookie or he was having a heart attack. I voted for pining.

“Hey, Robert,” she said, dumping an armful of groceries on my counter. “I’m going to try out some of these appliances before we send them back. Who knows, I may wonder where they’ve been all my life.”

“What is all this anyway?” he asked, indicating the boxes with a nod of his head.

Amber spoke up then. “Hey, Uncle Bob.” She gave him a quick hug. “This is Charley’s attempt to cope with her feelings of insecurity and helplessness. In a sad effort to gain control over her life again, she has turned to hoarding.”

“For heaven’s sake,” I said, offering Cookie my best glower, “I’m not a hoarder.”

“Don’t look at me.” She pointed to the fruitcake of her loins.

“We watched a documentary at school,” Amber said. “I learned a lot.”

“Obviously, but for your information, I am not attempting to hoard control over my sad … helplessness.”

“Oh, yeah?” Her eyes narrowed into a challenge if I’d ever seen one.

“Yeah,” I said, following suit, trying not to grin.

“Then why do you wear that gun everywhere you go?”

“Why does everyone have to give Margaret a hard time?”

She raised one brow. “You’ve never carried one before.”

“I’ve never been tortured within an inch of my life before, either.”

“My point exactly,” she said, but her face softened, and I realized I shouldn’t have brought that up. Apparently my being tortured not fifty feet from her had caused her no small amount of distress. Or nightmares. “And I’m sorry for making it so rudely,” she continued.

Cookie put a hand on her shoulder.

“No,” I said, stepping forward and taking her lovely chin into my hand. “I’m sorry that happened, Amber. And I’m very sorry you were so close when it did.”

I’d never told her that the man who attacked me had been in the room with her for God only knew how long before I showed up. I’d never even told Cookie, and I never kept secrets from her. But I had no idea how she would take it, knowing that the wreckage from my life had spilled over into hers. Had almost gotten her daughter—and herself, for that matter—killed. I just didn’t know how to tell her.

“Well, I wish I’d been closer,” she said, a vehemence thickening her voice. “I would’ve killed him for you, Charley.”

I pulled her into a hug, her graceful body more bone than flesh. “I know you would’ve. Of that, I have no doubt.”

“Am I interrupting?”

I looked past Amber as my sister, Gemma, walked in. She had long blond hair and big blue eyes, which was a bitch growing up with, getting asked questions like, “Why aren’t you pretty like your sister?” Not that I was bitter.

Gemma and I weren’t super-close growing up. Her insistence that our stepmother was not an alien monster sent from a tiny settlement somewhere on the seventh ring of Saturn had tainted any rapport we might have had, sibling or otherwise. But now that she was a psychiatrist, we could talk about the fact that our stepmother was an alien monster sent from a tiny settlement somewhere on the seventh ring of Saturn like two grown adults. Though she still didn’t believe me.

Amber turned. “Hi, Gemma,” she said before heading to my computer. Or trying to head to my computer. “Can I update my status before I do my homework, Charley?” She craned her neck so she could see over the wall of boxes. Hopefully she’d find the computer. I hadn’t seen it in weeks, but surely it was still where I’d left it.

“Sure. What are you going to say?”

“I’m going to tell everyone Mom had the talk with me.” She air-quoted the pertinent information.

I snorted and regarded Cookie with a questioning brow. “The one about the birds and the bees?”

“Oh, no, not that one,” Amber said. “We had that one ages ago.” As tall as she was, I still lost her when she entered the forest of square trees. But her voice was coming through the boxes loud and clear. “The one about how guys are really aliens sent to Earth to harvest the intelligence from young, pliant brains like mine. Apparently, I won’t be completely safe from their techniques until I’m thirty-seven and a half.”