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A month ago, even a week ago, Gaia would have been happy to see Ella buried six feet under. The woman had done everything possible to make Gaia's life a living hell. Including sleeping with Sam Moon. But then—

Gaia took a right onto Christopher Street, skidding for a moment on the cold pavement. She dashed across the street, barely registering a splash into one of those slush puddles that guaranteed wet socks and frozen toes. At least it was a little warmer than it had been. It
was already almost February, after all. Spring would be here soon. Gaia couldn't wait for the spring....

Maybe she should just stop thinking about Ella. Right. The coming spring meant making a fresh start. She should stop thinking about the past—and in particular, about what she'd learned of Ella in the past few days.
Her stepmother hadn't been a plastic, overly made-up nymphomaniac with an IQ of twenty.
No. The
real
Ella had been a master of the martial arts, intelligent, and incredibly complicated.

Just like me. Well, maybe except for the intelligent part. But otherwise . . .

After another skidding turn, the Nivens' Perry Street brownstone swam out of the wintry darkness, like it had so many times in the past. The windows were dark. Lifeless. The place was deserted, a tomb. Gaia swallowed as she bounded up the steps, her wet sneakers slapping on the smooth stone. If she'd never thought of this place as home before, she didn't know
what
to think of it now.

She slid her key into the dead-bolt lock and opened the door. The house was cold; not that this was any big surprise. Gaia felt as if she hadn't been here in a year. It was strange; she had been here twice today already—once to receive the call from the man at the morgue. The house had been cold then, too.

Even a week ago she would have been thrilled to
come into the brownstone and discover that she had the place to herself. But now as she stood in the narrow hallway by the ticking grandfather clock, she realized that it felt less like a tomb and more like a movie set. In a way it
was
a set, a stage.
A fake family had lived here, leading fake lives.

She started up the creaky staircase, averting her gaze from the cheesy photos that Ella had taken to enhance her image as a dumb bimbo. It was harder than ever to believe that Ella's husband, George—ironically, an old CIA buddy of her dad's—had insisted that this would be a
real
home. A place for Gaia to finally grow some roots after all those years of bouncing from one foster home to another . . . after her mom's death and her dad's disappearance.

A bitter bile rose in her throat. Gaia wouldn't think of her dad. Never again.
He
had engineered the destruction that had nearly consumed her.

Mary Moss would have found something funny about this situation,
Gaia thought as her footsteps pounded up the stairs.
She would have provided some old-fashioned gallows humor to make me laugh. . . .

But Mary had met the same fate as Ella. She had been assassinated. Every time Gaia thought of the sleazy drug dealer's henchman who had taken Mary's life, she felt like punching her fist through a wall—or better yet, through an assassin's face. She shook her head as she reached the fourth-floor landing. She still
wasn't sure
why
Ella had sacrificed herself to the assassin's bullet, why Ella had claimed that
she
was Gaia. Or maybe she just didn't want to dwell on it. The tears that Gaia had shed when she saw Ella's dead body had been real. She'd hated her foster mother for so long—and in the end, she'd seen the truth. They were kindred spirits. They were both utterly lost....

So maybe there was some humor in the situation. After all, when Gaia had first moved in, George had hoped that Ella would be a surrogate mother to her. Ha! It really would have been funny if it wasn't so pitiful and sad. For all she knew, George
still
believed that Ella had married him for love, that she'd had no hidden agenda,
that she hadn't been mixed up with something twisted and evil and cruel.
It was amazing, actually. How could somebody be so blind? Ella had done everything from “forget” to give Gaia phone messages, to sleep with Sam, to order a hit on Gaia's life.

On the other hand, Gaia knew all about willful blindness. She'd been wearing shades three feet thick for the first twelve years of her life. She hadn't caught a glimpse of her own father's true nature—

You're not going to think about him.

No. She had a new family now. She had Sam. She had her uncle. Oliver. Well, maybe she had Oliver. He'd promised to take her away—then vanished as abruptly as he'd appeared. But she was certain he
would contact her again. He
had
to. There was just no predicting when or how. Not with him.

And there was one more family member, too—one more member of the odd and disparate little unit of people Gaia had allowed herself to become close with. There was Ed Fargo. But then, Ed might be another “maybe” as well. He'd been there from the very start,
wheeling around the background of her life when she didn't know a soul aside from the freakish chess players in the park . . .
but now he was spending
way
too much time with Heather Gannis. In fact, now that Gaia really thought about it, Ed had become the first male FOH. The first Friend of Heather's who didn't wear lipstick. (Although who knew what Heather made him do when they were alone together?)

A smirk curled on Gaia's lips. What Ed needed was a good dose of reality. Some wheelchair jokes and Krispy Kreme doughnuts. The kind of thing Heather would never provide.

Gaia sighed, reaching the fourth-floor landing. The door of her room groaned as she pushed it open. In the shadows the bedroom looked the same as it had the last time she'd been in it. It felt the same, too. Like a hotel room.
Like a place to crash, but not a place where she belonged.
It was temporary. It always had been. Gaia flicked on
the light and began to throw items of clothing onto her bed.

Somewhere between the front door and the door of her bedroom, she had made a decision. She wouldn't stay in this house another day. Not another
second.
There was no reason. Even if her uncle Oliver didn't take her away, as he'd promised . . . well, she could always stay with Sam. Of course she could. She had to tell him about Oliver, anyway, about the possibility that she might be leaving New York for a while. Item by item the sum total of her possessions—her
life
—went into her ratty duffel bag: her cargo pants, her T-shirts and sweatshirts, the clothes that hung off her frame like potato sacks but still somehow couldn't conceal the muscles. . . .

But who cared about her bulging biceps and thunder thighs?
Sam liked the way she looked.
That was all that mattered.

It took Gaia all of seven minutes to gather everything. She left the pair of Gap capri pants she had bought during a moment of temporary insanity hanging in the closet. Then she swung her duffel bag over her shoulder and opened the bedroom window. She wanted to leave this house the way she had most often when Ella was alive. She would climb out of the window. She would escape.

A final tribute to Ella,
she thought, throwing her leg over the sill.
A very fitting tribute.

 

WAS THERE SOME CITY ORDINANCE
stating that all SoHo boutiques had to be smaller than a hundred square feet?

A Little PG-13 Fun

Ed Fargo drummed his fingers restlessly on his baggy jeans. This was the third place he and Heather had hit this afternoon, and he was starting to feel extremely claus-trophobic—especially since his wheelchair seemed to fill up half the room. Maybe that was why
every woman who worked in these stores maintained the weight of a life-size cardboard cutout.
If they were actually three-dimensional, they wouldn't be able to fit.

“How are we doing in there?” the saleswoman called, rapping on the dressing-room door. Her name was Simone. It figured. She pronounced it “seemoooane.” And there was another thing all SoHo saleswomen had in common: They favored the royal “we.” Probably so they could convince customers that “we” needed to spend three hundred and fifty dollars on a tank top.

“I'll be out in a minute,” came Heather's muffled reply.

Ed ran his hand through his scruffy brown hair and glanced around the shop, frowning. Another minute and he might go crazy and start trashing the
place. But he had woken up this morning with a mission. He was going to buy Heather Gannis an incredibly sexy, absurdly expensive new dress. No matter what the cost.

Yeah, the mission was sort of cheesy. Yeah, it was the kind of thing that only happened in those lame teen movies that seemed to come out every single week, the ones with titles like,
You Go, Girl!
or,
That's So Five Minutes Ago!
But under the circumstances, a little PG-13 teen fun was just fine.
Heather needed a pick-me-up in the same way Ed needed . . . well, best not to go there.

Her sister, Phoebe, was barely clinging to life after a bout with anorexia. Heather had just broken up with her old boyfriend, Sam Moon (not that Ed was particularly upset about
that,
of course), and on a more practical level, Ed was one of the few people outside of her immediate family who knew that the Gannis family was currently broke. Heather's life was shit. No doubt about it.

“One more second,” Heather called.

“Okay.” Simone glanced nervously in Ed's direction. “Would you and your, uh, friend like something to drink?” she asked the closed door. “Perrier? Evian?”

“Nothing for me, thanks,” Heather answered.

Ed resisted the urge to snort. Naturally, the
saleswoman assumed that Heather was just a “friend.”
She couldn't conceive that a girl who looked like Heather could possibly want to go out with a guy in a wheelchair.
Then again, sometimes it was hard for Ed to believe that, too. Two months ago he would have said that he and Heather had as much of a chance of getting back together as Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson.

“You know, she's my sister, actually,” he announced to Simone. “We were twins joined at birth. After the operation, she ended up with the spinal cord.”

The woman's eyes narrowed, but she smiled politely. And he had to hand it to her; that was a better reaction than most people could muster. Definitely. Most people either looked sick or simply ran off. Oh, yes. He knew all about people running off. Like Heather herself. She had done just that two years ago—right after the accident. And the fact that she had been completely in love with him
before
the accident didn't matter. Nope. As soon as Heather saw Ed in the wheelchair, she'd disappeared. Not literally, of course. She'd been right there, in his face, every single day at school, but Ed simply had to watch her from the sidelines.

But that was the past. He wouldn't allow himself to get bitter over it. Because one day a few weeks ago Ed had glimpsed the
old
Heather.
It was literally
as if she'd stepped out of a fog.
Gone were all the hang-ups and hangers-on, those “FOHs,” as Gaia Moore liked to call them. And then, after a few very bizarre and clumsy encounters—particularly one involving a strange and impulsive make-out session in a storage room at the Plaza Hotel—they suddenly found themselves falling back into their old relationship. And not a moment too soon. Because before that, Ed had been driving himself crazy with daily fantasies starring . . . well, none other than the FOH hater herself: Gaia Moore.

But there was no point in thinking about
her.
Especially not now.

Luckily, the dressing-room door happened to burst open at that second.

“Ta-da!” Heather exclaimed, strolling out into the shop.

Ed blinked. “Uh . . . wow,” he mumbled.
Brilliant compliment there, Fargo.
But it was by far the best he could manage, seeing as he was about to start drooling at any second.
Heather's shiny dark hair tumbled over the straps of the red dress, and the neckline plunged low, revealing a hint of cleavage
. The bottom barely cleared her knees. Ed's eyes roved up and down her body, eventually settling on her hips. The red fabric clung to them quite nicely.

Heather smiled, pivoting in front of a mirror. “I
take it that means you like it,” she stated wryly. Her amber-streaked eyes shone as she checked herself out.

Suddenly Ed found himself reaching for her hand. “Kiss me,” he whispered.

She glanced down at him, her brow furrowing. “What? Here?”

“Yeah,” he said, affecting a macho slouch. “And make it good.”

For a second she stared at him. Her eyes darted to Simone. Then she started laughing. “You're weird, Fargo.”

He shrugged. “I'm waiting.”

Heather's smile widened. Ed's heart picked up a beat. He was joking, sure. But it was strange; this was the very first time he actually felt in
charge,
in
control
with her—the way he had when he'd been able to use his legs and jump and skate and dance.
He wasn't even conscious of the chair.
At least, not until she leaned forward and put her arms around his neck, sliding her fingers—

Simone cleared her throat.

Heather pulled away, grinning wryly.

So much for the moment. Then again, this wasn't exactly a darkened storage room at the Plaza Hotel. Ed sighed and turned to the saleswoman.

“We'll take the dress,” he said.

Heather's jaw dropped. She started shaking her
head. “No way. I was just trying it on. Ed, this dress costs, like, four hundred bucks—”