I could almost hear Maggie yelling, Yes! Great! We can always use a cop on our side. Even if a police officer wasn’t involved with the particular case you were working, they could be excellent sources of information. And maybe it was time to truly forgive Vaughn. Clearly, my anger wasn’t hurting him very much, only me, making me cranky when I thought of it, making me see red.
“Yeah, well …” I said. “You’re right. I had a break-in.” I told him that no belongings had been disturbed. Or the front-door panel. Just the keypad on my own door.
He asked me about the front-door system, then added, “Who has the code for your own door?”
“Just a few family members. My friends Maggie and Q. And two cleaning ladies. And …” I trailed off, realizing more people than I’d thought had that code. “But it wasn’t used. The panel was ripped off.”
“You have an alarm?”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t turned on that night. We were just running out for something to eat.”
“Sounds like a warning,” Vaughn said.
That made me feel cold again. “What do you mean?”
“Someone was either looking for something and didn’t find it, or they wanted to fuck up your head, let you know they could get to you. Or both.”
Theo had put on his clothes and left the bedroom. I felt very alone, Vaughn’s casually spoken words reverberating in my head.
“Who?” I said, taking a seat on the bed. “Who would do that?”
“You piss anyone off lately?”
“No! I never piss people off.”
He laughed.
“Shut it,” I said, using Mayburn’s favorite expression. “I seemed to have pissed you off last year. But that’s a rare thing. People usually like me.” I suppose that wasn’t entirely true. There were people at my old law firm who weren’t big fans of mine, but that was because I pulled in more work than any other associate. And there was that Italian mobster whose plans I might have thwarted. Not to mention the underwear drug dealers I sent away. Okay. Maybe there were a few people I’d pissed off.
“What about your boyfriend, Theodore?” Vaughn asked.
Vaughn had met Theo after Jane died, but he had no reason to know we were still together.
“How did you know he was my boyfriend?” I asked.
“The responding officers told me.”
“Oh. Well, he doesn’t piss anyone off,” I said. I thought of his silences lately, his refusal to talk about the mortgage and what was going on. “I don’t think so.”
“Could be random. That’s the case a lot of times. Someone who noticed the front door unlocked and was looking to see if you had anything good in there.”
I had the feeling Vaughn was trying to make me feel better, but now I was feeling worse, unsafe. I sighed. “Thanks for calling.”
“Yeah, no problem. I’ll watch the case.”
I didn’t know what that meant. Didn’t ask, either. I just said thanks again and hung up.
10
Toward the end of brunch with Theo’s mom, his phone rang. He pulled it out of his jeans’ pocket, looked at the display. “It’s Eric,” he said. “Sorry, guys, I have to take this.”
“Do what you have to do,” Anna Jameson said, giving her son a good-natured wave of her hand. “We’ll be more than fine.”
It was the first time I’d met Theo’s mom. She was beautiful—tall and lean, with a willowy, lightly muscled, yoga-type body. Her hair was brown but sun-kissed, natural-looking. Her skin was luminous, her big eyes alive.
When we’d first sat down with Anna at the Walnut Room, Theo had introduced me, then reached out a tattooed arm and squeezed my shoulder. Now, as he stood to take the call, he put his hand lightly on the back of my head, holding it there for a moment. That hand had the tenderness of a kiss.
His mom saw it. Anna smiled at me as he walked away. “Thank you for letting him stay with you until he gets in his own place.”
“Sure.” I searched her face for a sign of whether Theo had told her about the break-in or getting turned down for a mortgage. She looked unperturbed, which I took to mean he hadn’t.
“I’ve never seen Theo like this,” Anna continued.
“Like what?”
She shrugged. “Like he is with you.”
This was said without irritation or territorialism. I knew that my friend Grady’s mom always seemed to take it personally when Grady dated someone, as if it were a slight to her. But Anna didn’t appear to be that type of person.
She glanced around the Walnut Room. “I can’t believe it’s the holidays.”
“But it’s not yet. It’s not even Thanksgiving. I’ve always thought they get the decorations up too early.” The place was bedecked in holiday regalia—ruby ribbons and forest-green bows, glittering red lights and a massive Christmas tree in the center of the room that, this year at least, had a woodsy theme with a plethora of faux birds and forest animals covering its branches.
“I like when Christmas lights are up way before Christmas,” Anna said. “It’s one of the things that make me happiest.” A smile spread across her face. “Theo is one of those things, too.”
“He said you two are close.”
She gave a short laugh. “Yes. Well, his father and I got pregnant when we were college sophomores. Brad never wanted a baby. I guess I didn’t, either, not in theory. But once Theo was here, it was clear he was always supposed to be here. He was just the light that always shone. Brad and I stayed together until Theo was out of school. Then Brad wanted to move on, to be somebody different. I couldn’t totally blame him.”
“That’s big of you.”
She gave a shrug. “You can only do what you can do. My parents considered themselves hippies, and they always used to say that. You know, ‘live and let live.’ And I have to say, that kind of attitude applies to nearly every situation. I had breast cancer a few years ago, and that really helped me through that.” She sighed. “So many challenges.”
“Wow. That must have been tough. Were you and Brad still together then?”
“No. No. We’d just broken up, and we only saw each other like we do now—at events for Theo. We were together so long that we’re more like brother and sister.” She gave a rueful chuckle, shaking her head. “I ran into him the other day when I was with a girlfriend at Tavern on Rush. We sat down outside, and I looked over, and there was Brad with a woman who was Theo’s age, maybe younger.”
Was that a stab at the age difference Theo and I had?
But Anna just shrugged again. “Brad is like that. He’s a big boy in the business world, but he doesn’t want to grow up personally. It no longer affects me.”
“I haven’t met Brad yet,” I said. “We’ve been trying to meet up with him but it keeps getting rescheduled.”
A rueful smile. “By Brad, I’m sure, not Theo.”
“Sounds like it.”
She sighed. “Theo wants so badly to have a relationship with him. When he was eighteen or nineteen, he really turned to Brad and it was hard for me to watch him struggle when his father still wasn’t the fathering type.” She looked toward the restrooms. Theo was heading back our way. “I used to worry that Theo would emulate him, but I think it’s caused him to go the other way. He’s more