The Anatomical Shape of a Heart(61)

“My mom collects art,” he said as I stared up a painting of a crazy-colored chair. “Mostly California artists. She really digs old chairs.”

“Yes, I can see that,” I said diplomatically, spotting other chair paintings further into the home.

“It’s kooky, I know. I’ll give you the VIP tour. You’ll see more chairs than you ever dreamed possible.”

He started at the kitchen, which wasn’t much bigger than ours but gleamed with top-of-the-line appliances, polished marble, and custom cabinetry. The floating wooden bridge I’d seen on the Fourth of July connected to a back door there. “We used to have a lot of cocktail parties on the deck,” Jack noted.

Used to. He didn’t comment on what had happened in this kitchen to put an end to those parties, but I couldn’t help staging it in my head, wondering if I was standing where Jillian had stabbed her mom. We breezed through the living room and headed downstairs, which was basically one big open room divided into smaller areas: an entertainment area for watching movies, another fireplace lounge, a bar, lots of the chairs he promised (along with more paintings of chairs), and a billiards table. “No one even knows how to play pool,” Jack admitted.

I gestured to a receiver behind a built-in glass cabinet. “That’s some stereo.”

“Music can be piped into the room of your choice, or all of them. Dad uses it for parties, so music can stream through the entire house. He has an old record collection and the turntable there.”

“Gee, the mayor’s a hipster. Who knew?”

“Yeaaaah, no. He likes the Eagles.”

I laughed. “My mom still thinks Depeche Mode is cutting edge.”

“How about radio instead? Pick a decade.” He flipped channels featuring songs from the 1940s to the 1990s. We settled on the 1950s, partly because “Heartbreak Hotel” was playing, and I reached up and ran my fingers through Jack’s Elvis hair. “Do you sing, too?” I teased.

“Not outside a shower,” he said, capturing my wrists and pulling my hands to his chest. “Hope you don’t have dreams of a poetic, guitar-playing boyfriend who writes you bad love songs, because I am terrible at all that.”

“Do you even know me at all? I like anatomical hearts, not valentines.”

He glanced down at my heart … or at my cleavage—hard to tell which. I was wearing a black shirt that usually tilted off one shoulder, but because I still had my jacket on, the “tilt” had shifted to the front and revealed more than I’d intended. Or just the right amount.

I felt a little self-conscious, so I pulled away and strolled around the room. I spotted a door in a darkened corner. Wrong thing.

“Before you ask, that’s the door to the basement, and, no, I won’t go down there. Like, ever again.”

Crap. “I don’t blame you.”

He absently scratched the side of his neck. “To be honest, I don’t like being down here on this floor, either.”

I nodded, not knowing what to say. But he didn’t linger on the memory. He just smiled softly and hooked his pinky around mine. “Let’s go upstairs. There’s something I want to show you.”

Backtracking up the big staircase, we headed to the top floor, music following us all the way up. Four bedrooms were clustered around his father’s office, which was one of those messy-neat rooms, with small stacks of paper and file folders everywhere. “It looks like someone cleans around the piles,” I said, smiling at the vacuum-cleaner ruts still visible in the rug.

“Mrs. Weiser, every other morning on weekdays. She’s our maid. She doesn’t come when my parents are out of town.”

Ooh-la-la, a maid. Must be nice. It took me several seconds to realize he was assuring me we were alone, and that made my stomach do a few cartwheels.

He led me up a tiny spiral staircase in the corner of the office. We emerged into a renovated attic space. White walls covered the underside of a pitched roof, making an upside-down V. Short bookshelves lined the sides. The only pieces of furniture were a small stuffed chair and a reading lamp. A light blue rug covered most of the wood floor.

The back of the room contained a porthole window that overlooked the decks, but it was the front wall that drew all my attention. It was made of glass, and two doors in the middle pushed out and folded back on themselves to open up the room onto a small balcony, where a waist-high wall of glass separated us from a stunning view of the city.

Cool night air rushed through the open doorway as we stepped out onto the balcony. The tree-lined hill of Parnassus sloped to the left (and beyond that, my neighborhood). Buena Vista Park sat to our right, and the heart of San Francisco lay before us. Darkening streets slanted toward a pink sunset. We weren’t high enough to see the Bay in the distance, but it was a million-dollar view nonetheless.

We sat down side by side on the edge of the rug, legs stretching onto the balcony, and looked through the glass wall.

“Cool, right?” Jack asked. “It’s the best part of the house. Jillian and I used to come out here and sail paper airplanes over the rooftops.”

Minutes passed while we listened to music and watched streetlights twinkle to life under the rolling fog. I must’ve gotten a little too relaxed, because when he finally spoke, it startled me. “I want to know why it was so bad for you when you and that Howard Hooper guy dated.”