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  Her mother gives Effie a steady, solemn and completely venomous look. “You weren’t that first time.”

  Effie knocks the phone from her mother’s hand. It bounces onto the desk. The battery compartment pops open, the battery pack and a small tangle of wires comes out, and the phone itself lets out a loud, somehow startled buzz for a second before going silent.

  “No. You can’t! They’ll arrest him!”

  “He already has a record, Effie. That boy is nothing but trouble and always has been.” Her mother’s nostrils flare. If she knew how horrid she looks, she’d be embarrassed, she would hide her face.

  “Heath...” But here Effie falters.

  Her mother shakes her head. “He’s a sad, sick boy. He will never amount to anything. He uses you. He’s no good for you.”

  He isn’t good for her, though not for the reasons her mother thinks. Heath is not good for Effie because he loves her too hard, wants to give her too much. He reminds her constantly of how empty she is inside.

  “This baby isn’t Heath’s. You can’t get him into trouble, Mom. Not for this.”

  “Then who did it to you?”

  Effie turns. “Nobody did it to me! It happened. I wasn’t careful enough. I thought I was, but I wasn’t.”

  “Who?” her mother repeated.

  Effie knows exactly who the father of this baby is, and she will never tell anyone. Not her mother, who would rage against him even more than she does against Heath, for whom she at least on occasion has felt a twisted, sanctimonious sort of pity. Her mother wouldn’t feel that way about the baby’s father. She would lose her shit completely. He’d lose his job, for sure. There would be a scandal. People would be looking at Effie again.

  Effie won’t tell him, either. He might be the sort of guy to step up to the plate when it comes to things like this. He’s got a hero complex, Effie knows that for sure. He might do the right thing, but he would hate her for it forever. Besides, he lives in a one-bedroom apartment with battered furniture and no matching dishes, and he gets drunk too much and sometimes he asks her to do things to him Effie had never imagined a man liking. Or herself, for that matter.

  He’s not a man she wants to marry, that’s for damn sure, and he’s not one she wants to tie herself to forever, either. Not no way, not no how. Her hands go protectively over her belly. She will never tell him.

  “I don’t know,” Effie says, then adds hastily, “only that it’s not Heath.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know? How can you not know? Effie, if someone hurt you...again...”

  That old story. Effie’s chin lifts. Daddy had never “hurt” her in that way, but there was no way for her to say it so that anyone would ever believe it.

  “I mean there’ve been so many boys,” Effie lies flatly. “It could be any of several dozen. It means I don’t know, Mother. It means I don’t even know the names of some of them. Or where they live.”

  Mom takes a step back. She shakes her head. She looks broken, and why? Because her daughter admitted to having sex? To getting knocked up? Effie had spent three years as a captive of a sick man determined to steal someone else’s children when he was denied access to his own, and this was what broke her mother?

  Effie goes to the closet and pulls out a bag. Starts to fill it. She doesn’t pay attention to what she’s tossing in there. Shirts, pants, some underwear, socks, a sweater she hates but throws in anyway.

  “What are you doing?”

  Effie doesn’t look at her mother. “I’m leaving.”

  “Effie. No. Wait. Please...we’ll take care of this. We can have it dealt with. You don’t have to ruin your life!”

  Effie thinks of all the blood, of how it had slipped out of her so easily, before. In silence. All the worst things happen in the silence.

  Effie pauses, again touching her belly. “Was your life ruined when you had me?”

  “I was married and twenty-four years old,” her mother says. “You can hardly compare. I want more for you than this.”

  “Maybe this is the best I can expect to have. I’m leaving. I’ll call and tell you where I am.”

  When Effie shows up at Heath’s door, he lets her in without needing to be asked. When Effie kisses him, he lets her. He takes her in his arms and together they fall down on the mattress with its rumpled sheets.

  His hands roam over her body. Naked, she arches beneath his touch. Her nipples are more sensitive. When he slides one between his lips, she can’t keep quiet. He puts a hand over her mouth to stifle her. They shouldn’t have to be silent, not here in this shitty warehouse loft where the neighbors can’t hear a thing through four-foot-thick brick. It’s an old habit they might grow out of, someday, if they keep doing this. For now, his rough, warm hand tastes of salt, and he covers her mouth while she cries out.

  His fingers move between her legs, finding her slick and secret places. He toys with her, teasing her to the edge without letting her go over. When she tries to fight him, to move so his fingers will press harder on her clit and make her come, Heath grips her wrists in his hand and forces her onto her stomach. For a moment, she fights harder, thinking of the child. Worried of hurting it...though she’s lost a baby before. She knows what to expect. It wouldn’t be the most awful thing in the world if it happened again, would it?

  She fights anyway because it excites him. Because when he grabs the back of her hair to yank her head back and to push her again into the mattress, facedown and ass up, it excites her. He doesn’t spank her. It’s not about making this some kind of late-night Skinemax movie with handcuffs and feather masks.

  Effie isn’t sure what it is about.

  Only that it...is. This. Heath behind her, ramming himself inside her so deep she’s sure he will kill her with his cock. With the grip of his fingers so tight on her skin she will find the marks there for days.

  There were times, long, long ago when she can remember exploring her body in the late-night darkness of her canopy bed. Tiny breasts, the surprising tingle of touching her nipples, the more exciting rush she felt when her hand slipped between her legs. The first few threads of curling hair. How her body opened the longer she touched and stroked. She hadn’t known it was sex, but she had known it felt good.

  Effie can hardly imagine doing that now. Making herself come? She’s not sure she could. The only pleasure she can really find is with him.

  When her body clenches around him, he shudders and pulls out. Scalding lashes of ejaculate hit her back. Her arms. Her ass. She buries her face in the pillow, shaking with her climax. Then with tears.

  Heath doesn’t ask her who the baby belongs to. He simply nods when she tells him. He holds her close, curled in a ball, and he kisses her forehead. When she can’t stand the closeness of the embrace any longer, he lets her go. It’s what he does. Know when to let her go.

  “I’m with Heath,” Effie tells her mother over the phone. “But so help me, Mom, if you call the police or in any way get him into trouble, I will never come home. I will never let you see this baby. I will disappear, and this time, you will never get me back.”

  Effie’s mother sounds as though she’s been chain-smoking and sobbing. She probably has. “Don’t you understand I only want the best for you? Maybe you’ll get it now, when you become a mother. I want what’s best. That’s all. And Heath, Effie...he’s ruined you.”

  “Don’t you get it?” Effie says tiredly, wishing all of this would go away. “I was already ruined.”

  chapter twenty-nine

  Naveen had called Effie early this morning about doing a gallery show, all on her own. Effie listened to the message as she sipped lukewarm coffee in her quiet house and thought about the work she’d have to do to paint enough pieces to have a real show. Her kitschy hidden clock paintings weren’t going to cut it. They paid the bills, though, and she had o