IZZY IS SITTING IN THE LIVING ROOM when I come back from my morning run. “You okay?” she asks.

“Yeah.” I unlace my sneakers, wipe the sweat off my forehead.

“Why?”

“Because normal people don’t go jogging at 4:30 A.M.”

“Well, I had some energy to burn off.” I go into the kitchen, but the Braun coffeemaker I’ve programmed tohave my hazelnut ready at this very moment hasn’t done its job. I check Eva’s plug, and press some of herbuttons, but the whole LED display is shot. “Dammit,” I say, yanking the cord out of the wall. “This isn’t oldenough to be broken.”

Izzy comes up beside me and fiddles with the system. “Is she under warranty?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. All I know is when you pay for something that’s supposed to give you a cup ofcoffee, you deserve to get your fucking cup of coffee.” I slam down the empty glass carafe so hard it breaksin the sink. Then I slide down against the cabinets and start to cry.

Izzy kneels down next to me. “What did he do?”

“The same exact thing, Iz,” I sob. “I am so damn stupid.”

She puts her arms around me. “Boiling oil?” she suggests. “Botulism? Castration? You pick.”

That makes me smile a little. “You’d do it, too.”

“Only because you’d do it right back for me.”

I lean against my sister’s shoulder. “I thought lightning wasn’t supposed to strike in the same place twice.”

“Sure it does,” Izzy tells me. “But only if you’re too dumb to move.”

The first person to greet me at court the next morning isn’t a person at all, but Judge the dog. He comesslinking around a corner with his ears flattened, no doubt running away from the sound of his owner’s raisedvoice. “Hey,” I say, soothing, but Judge wants none of it. He latches on to the bottom of my suit jacket—Campbell’s paying the dry cleaning bill, I swear it—and starts to drag me toward the fray.

I can hear Campbell before I turn the corner. “I wasted time, and manpower, and you know what, that’s notthe worst of it. I wasted my own good judgment about a client.”

“Yeah, well, you aren’t the only one who judged wrong,” Anna argues back. “I hired you because I thoughtyou had a spine.” She pushes past me. “Asshole,” she mutters under her breath.

In that moment, I remember the way I felt when I woke up alone on that boat: Disappointed. Drifting. Angryat myself, for getting into this situation.

Why the hell wasn’t I angry at Campbell?

Judge leaps up on Campbell, scraping at his chest with his paws. “Get down!” he orders, and then he turnsaround and sees me. “You weren’t supposed to hear all that.”

“I’ll bet.”

He sits heavily on a bridge............