Deconstructed(24)

“The cake will take forty-five minutes. That okay?”

“Sure. I have some calls to make,” Scott said, emerging from the pantry, crumbs dotting his sports coat. His hair had thinned on top, and the lines around his eyes were prominent, but he still looked like a well-aged Hollywood type with his flashing grin, tanned expanse of jaw, and way of carrying himself. Still handsome. Still so familiar. My heart hurt when I thought about what he’d done. How he’d ended us.

Scott was so different from the man who kept crowding my thoughts more than I wanted to admit. And I don’t know why I kept thinking about Griffin Moon. It was weird, really. Because on first sight, Ruby’s cousin had irritated the crap out of me with his whole judgy blue-collar thing. But then when we were sitting in the cab of the truck, Ruby in the middle of us like a referee, and me on the other side, still grappling with what I had discovered, Griffin had looked over at me. At that moment, I believed that if I had pushed hard enough, he would have driven his surprisingly tidy wrecker to my address and whipped my cheating husband’s butt.

The image of the rough-around-the-edges tow truck guy pounding my preppy banker husband appealed to me more than it should. Griffin had tangled hair, scruff on his chin, and tats. He wasn’t my type on a good day. And definitely not on the night I had been slapped with proof that Scott was an adulterer. Yeah, my “type” had been dumping cherry lube in forbidden places on another woman, so what did I really know about men?

Men. H’uh. What are they good for?

Absolutely nothin’. Uh-huh, uh-huh.

I bopped my head to the unsung song with the wrong lyrics as I thought about another man when I still had the problem of the current one. Still, something about the way Griffin Moon had regarded me had stuck with me. Maybe it was because I imagined he’d peeled away my facade . . . that somehow he could see the shattered woman under the bravado. It wasn’t a “like recognized like” sort of thing. No, that man hadn’t seemed vulnerable at all. But he’d probably seen his fair share of beaten-down people . . . and perhaps he assumed I was one.

And that stuck in my craw.

Because I didn’t want to be that woman.

I’d had my moments of scrabbling around on the ground looking for the pieces of myself over the past week, but I was done. Paper people are consumed by fire, dissipating into ash before scattering into the wind, never to be whole again. But others, those made of steel, used the fire to forge an edge. The heat hardened them, creating razor determination, melding them into something stronger.

My anger would create steel. So there was no need for anyone to cast sympathetic glances my way.

My phone chirruped, and I glanced down at a text.

Ruby.

How are you?

I set the timer and picked up my phone.

I’m good.

Little dots appeared.

Good.

I smiled at my phone, feeling gratified with where I was—I was beginning to accept and pivot. Then I glanced at the doorway where Scott had disappeared, picked up the phone, and clicked on the link Patrick Vitt, PI, had sent me. I had forty-five minutes until I had to go fake my date with my husband. Might as well fill out the agreement to engage Vitt’s services. It was time to catch the cheaterpants on camera.

Side-eyeing the cake that was starting to rise in the oven, I smiled again. Maybe I would bake Scott a cake on the day we divorced . . .

Nah. He wasn’t worth a Bundt.





CHAPTER SEVEN


RUBY

I stared hard at the door of my cousin’s private investigation office before I knocked. For the past few years I had walled out my family, pretending I was an orphan or maybe someone who’d been knocked in the head and had forgotten who she was.

Because I had wanted to forget who I was.

The Balthazars had a reputation, even if some of them, like Griff, had managed to escape the shit stain of our birth. This particular cousin, Josh “Juke” Jefferson, had done okay for himself; well, for a while, anyway. That was because he’d married up to a woman who toed the line and made sure he did, too. He’d gone to the police academy as if to thumb his nose at the criminals in his family and had lived a good, upstanding life down south until his wife had gotten cancer and had the gall to die. That had been three years ago, and Juke had drowned his sorrows for months, eventually crashing his cruiser and getting dismissed from the force. Without a job or purpose for living, he’d headed home and hung out a shingle in north Shreveport, vowing to catch secretaries who stole petty cash and deadbeat dads who didn’t pay child support. So far he’d managed to complete a few dozen cases and drink his liver into early retirement. My gran had relayed the fact that Juke had been told by his doctor to quit the hooch or die.

I hoped he’d chosen the former, but I was fairly certain meeting his maker didn’t scare Juke.

So even though I’d promised I was done with being a Balthazar, here I stood, prepared to bring another back into my life. All thanks to Cricket.

Thing was, my boss needed to get her shit together, and if that meant asking another one of my cousins for help, then I would do it. Because running a business wasn’t as fun as it seemed. And I had been captaining the ship that was Printemps for far too long. Okay, it was only a little over a week, give or take a few hours, but I didn’t like haggling with old birds who saw imaginary scratches on their console tables, and I hated dealing with jerks in France who delayed shipments for a third time.