“I yell a lot at Angela,” he corrected.
“Did you yell at your wife?”
“Once. When she got rid of my favorite jeans. I apologized later,” he quickly added.
That seemed like a small offense. Zona frowned. “Were there times you didn’t yell at her when you wanted to?”
“When she wrecked the car. I was just relieved she wasn’t hurt. Oh, yeah, and when we were first married, she sucked at budgets, always overspent. That made me crazy, but I never yelled. Nagged a lot, but never yelled.”
“I yell,” Zona confessed.
“Yeah? What makes you yell?”
She could almost see a reflection of her exes’ faces on the surface of the water. “Cheating and lying. I yelled at my first husband because he thought it was okay to cheat on me. I yelled at Gary because his gambling ruined our lives.”
“I’d have done more than yell,” said Alec.
“I managed to forgive Luke. God only knows how. But Gary...” Her eyes narrowed at the memory of what he’d done, and her fists clenched. “I can’t forgive him. He stole from me. And from Bree. That was the worst. He made a mess of our lives and I’m still cleaning it up.”
Alec nodded. “I feel the same way about Angela. Only difference is I caught her before she could totally screw me over.”
“I felt... violated,” Zona confessed.
“But you’re moving on,” he pointed out.
“On my own. How do I dare do that with someone?”
He took a deep breath. “Therapy? Hire a hit man?”
“Don’t tempt me.”
“Look, I don’t exactly know how we get those two out of our heads, but we can’t let them keep hanging on to us. I say we leave ’em in the dust. We break the rearview mirror, rev the engine, and go for it.”
“You know, for a builder you do have a way with words,” she said.
“I have a way with my hands, too,” he said. He gave her a full smile and, once more, her body temperature shot up.
Maybe she was ready to rev her engine.
“AS LONG ASyou’re taking it slow, you’ll be fine,” Gracie assured her when they met for coffee.
But the more time Zona spent with Alec the more tempted she was to forget going slow and race forward. Until she envisioned that horrible moment when she’d discovered the savings for Bree’s college fund had been drained, the moment when the truth came out and she learned that Gary had taken them to a very high cliff and pulled them all off it. After that it wasn’t hard at all to put on the brakes.
GARY SHOWED UPat Louise’s house on a Thursday right after Zona had gotten home from work, an unwelcome ghost from the past. She was about to put together a shrimp salad for Louise and Gilda, and Martin, who had been invited to hang around for dinner and a movie, then planned to work a shift for HopIn. Gilda had been anxious to indulge her sweet tooth and had gone to fetch something for dessert and Martin hadn’t yet arrived, so it was just Zona and Louise in the house when the knock on the door came.
Assuming it was Martin, Zona opened the door with asmile on her face. The smile got gobbled by a glare the second she saw Gary standing there. The smile he’d been trying for collapsed.
“What are you doing here?” Her words came out like shards of ice.
“Can I come in for a minute?”
“No.”
He took in a deep breath, resigned to the stony welcome he was receiving. “Okay. I won’t stay long.”
“You won’t stay at all. Why are you here, Gary?”
He cleared his throat, pulled a check out of his slacks pocket. “I have something for Bree.” He held it out to Zona.
