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  I had a hard time imagining mild-mannered Jared angry, but I could guess at his reasons.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, but I need him to go on this call for me, and you need to get him out here.”

  “He’s really mad at me,” she repeated.

  Somewhere inside me I found the patience to be kind. “Just talk to him, Shelly. Like you’ve done a hundred times. Nothing’s different about that.”

  She made a sort of sniffling snort, but I heard the crackle of the intercom system and after a second she stuttered his name. “J-J-Jared?”

  His reply was less clear, filtered by the intercom, distance and my phone, and I rolled my eyes at her for not hanging up with me to talk to him. He showed up a couple minutes later, but not through the door from the lobby. He’d come around out of the back, which could have been for the convenience of leaving from the door closest to where he’d been working, or because he was avoiding Shelly. He slid into the passenger seat and buckled his belt without a word.

  He stared out the window during the entire drive, and I didn’t break the silence with even the radio. At the family’s house we took care of their grandma as quickly as we could, though she’d passed away in an upstairs bedroom with a doorway too narrow for our gurney to fit through. In fact, Grandma was nearly too wide to fit through that door, a problem that caused Jared and I a few minutes of careful manipulation that left us both sweating. Lifting bodies is an activity more suited for sweatpants, but we never went to a death call at a house in anything less formal than a suit. We owed the family that measure of respect, even if it made our jobs that much more difficult.

  Jared took the body to the van while I spoke briefly with the family, who agreed to come to the funeral home later that day to make the arrangements. I offered my condolences and met Jared, already behind the wheel of the van.

  “Jared.”

  His shoulders slumped a bit. He pulled the keys from his pocket and shoved them in the ignition. “Yeah.”

  The situation with him and Shelly wasn’t my concern except in how it affected my business, and so far I couldn’t see that his behavior was. He’d been polite and personable to the family, and helpful to me. Yet there was no mistaking the fact Jared wasn’t acting like himself.

  We didn’t have a terribly long drive back to the funeral home, but I wanted to talk about this before we got there. There’s something about conversations in the car that make some things easier to say. Concentrating on the road meant he didn’t have to look at me.

  I asked him the same thing I’d asked Shelly. “Want to talk about it?”

  “I think you and Shelly talked about it enough.” He signaled for the turn, but traffic going in both directions meant he couldn’t pull onto the main street.

  So I hadn’t been imagining that he was avoiding me, too. “She was upset. I asked her what was wrong. Look, you kids—”

  “I’m not a kid, Grace. Neither is she.”

  I’d only meant to tease. Both of them were only a few years younger than I. “I know that.”

  Jared’s fingers tapped rapidly on the wheel, and he stared straight ahead while I stared at his profile. It wasn’t hard for me to see why Shelly liked him. He had a good face, not classically handsome but appealing.

  More cars passed in front of us, and I watched Jared watch them as he waited for his chance to pull into traffic. He’d set his mouth into a thin, grim line that didn’t suit him.

  “I didn’t come on to her.” He bit out the words. “I know she’s got Duane. I’m not the one who started it.”

  At last there was a break in the traffic and Jared pulled onto the main street, his driving still careful despite his agitation. It didn’t make much of a difference in our position on the road.

  We were on the main street, but it was still a two-lane, backcountry road that twisted and turned and only needed one slow driver to back up traffic for a mile.

  “She told me what happened.”

  “Yeah.” He bit out a laugh along with the word. “The favor. Doing her a favor.”

  Traffic crept along, but the source of the delay was too far ahead and behind the curve to know the cause. “She told me, Jared.”

  He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe it. “She asked me to do her a favor, like I was some sort of gigolo. And I did it! God, Grace! I did it!”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” I offered, but the bricks had already started tumbling.

  “Why? Because I’m a guy?” Jared’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, but he kept his eyes straight ahead as the cars in front of us sped up and he followed. “It’s okay because I’m a guy, and everyone knows we all think with our dicks, right?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No. She did.” He shook his head again as the van picked up speed around a turn. “Or something like it, anyway. About how we should just forget about what happened because it didn’t mean anything.”

  I gripped the padded door handle as he took the turn too fast. “Jared—”

  “It meant something,” he snapped. “At least it did to me.”

  We whipped around the turn and caught up to the long line of cars once more stopped behind the construction that had closed one side of the road. I gasped and braced myself on instinct, but Jared eased the brakes swiftly and with such skill the van didn’t even rock as he stopped.

  He turned to look at me, one hand still gripping the wheel but the other resting on the edge of his seat. “She told me you’re the one who said it shouldn’t mean anything. Thanks a lot.”

  My mind raced as I tried to recall what, exactly, I’d told Shelly. I was pretty sure that wasn’t it. “Jared, I never told her to sleep with you.”

  “You did. Even if you didn’t say it, she took you as an example.”

  That slapped me, hard, into anger. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  The construction crew flipped the sign from Stop to Slow, and we began inching forward again, the cars ahead of us picking up speed that hadn’t yet made it to the end of the line. Jared half turned to the front, easing off the brakes but not yet using both hands on the wheel again.

  That’s when some moron with a fire in his pants came flying around the turn behind us, didn’t bother to check the fact that though traffic was moving, we and the four cars in front of us were not, and rammed into the back of the van.

  It was a helluva way to get out of an uncomfortable conversation.

  Chapter 13

  My seat belt cut into my shoulder and the air bag deployed, making the world go white in front of my eyes. I heard Jared shout but could make no such noise myself. I could think it though, over and over.

  Oh, shit. Shit, shit, shit and double-damn shit on seven kinds of shit-covered bricks.

  Then, silence.

  I was vaguely aware of Jared asking me if I was all right, but I was already fumbling with my seat belt and pushed open my door to stumble out of the van. I fell on some loose gravel, skinning both my knees and ruining my last good pair of panty hose. I got up and went around to the back of the van, sending up a prayer to any deity that would listen that there hadn’t been too much damage.

  The driver of the other car was getting out more slowly. I caught a glimpse of gray hair and polyester and bit back another curse. Someone’s grandma had rear-ended us in her big old boat of a car and pretty much crunched us all to hell.

  “What were you doing?” she shouted with the self-righteous fury of the wronged. “Why were you stopped in the middle of the road?”

  We had an audience. I hadn’t noticed until that moment that our van had leaped forward to hit the back of the car in front of us. We couldn’t have slammed it that hard, but it was enough to crumple the bumper. The driver of that car was out, too, staring at the damage with Jared, and the road crew on our side had put down their signs to run toward us.

  Feeling suddenly woozy, I put a hand on the van. More important than my vehicle was its cargo, and I was almost too afraid