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house had a heartbeat that was throbbing around her. If she’d been imaginative, which thank God she wasn’t, she would have sworn that she could hear it breathing.
    That she could hear something breathing.
    Get a grip, Riley.
    If there was any breathing going on, who was it going to be but Jeff? If, say, he was passed out somewhere nearby and hadn’t heard her calling him.
    On the other hand, it could be anyone—or any thing.
    Her heart thumped.
    Don’t be such a wimp, she told herself impatiently. But as she neared the end of the hall, as darkness swallowed her up and her makeshift flashlight found the closed, arched double doors that opened into the gathering room, she had to admit that she was (maybe just a little bit) afraid. And that ticked her off more than anything else so far.
    She’d already texted Jeff when she’d arrived. Now she phoned him, using her index finger to savagely punch his call button. When she heard the muffled sound of his phone ringing—she knew the sound of his ringtone as well as she knew her own—she stiffened, listening.
    He was close.
    The sound cut off after four rings as his phone went to voice mail, but not before she had zeroed in on its location: the gathering room. Which was directly in front of her. Riley frowned. If he was in there, no way he hadn’t heard her yelling for him. Either he’d just come inside from the pool, or he had his earphones in, or he was in there passed out. Or he’d left his phone in there and he was elsewhere, a less likely option because he was rarely separated from his phone.
    In any case, she knew where to start looking. She took the few steps needed to reach the heavy double doors and pushed them open.
    After the darkness at the end of the hall, the moonlight flooding the huge room made it seem almost bright.
    â€œJeff?”
    Her shoes sounded especially loud on the marble as she walked through the doorway and looked around. In here, thefaint musty smell had an acidic overtone that she couldn’t quite place. The room was the approximate size of a gymnasium, all white marble with a domed ceiling, half a dozen French doors looking out onto the pool area, a huge carved-marble fireplace at one end, and a gallery—the backside of the second-floor landing—running its length. The modest two-bedroom brick house she’d grown up in would have fit in this one room twice over, a fact that she had once found impossibly intimidating. What she’d learned since could be summed up in four words: mo’ money, mo’ problems. Once upon a time, she wouldn’t have believed that, certainly not when she was back in Philly scrambling for every dollar.
    If Jeff was in the gathering room she couldn’t see him, but then again shadows lay everywhere and the silvery moonlight didn’t quite reach the corners, which made them as dark as the end of the hall. She really didn’t scare easily but right now, under these particular circumstances, she discovered that she was . . . uneasy. She didn’t like having her stomach flutter, or her pulse quicken. She didn’t like having her heart pound like it knew something she didn’t.
    She didn’t like being here, period.
    â€œJeff?” Now that was loud. Her voice bounced off the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the resulting echoes putting her even more on edge than before. No answer, either, which ratcheted up her annoyance to a whole new level.
    This is the last time I go running after you, she promised her ex-husband silently, on the verge of doing what she knew was the smart thing: turning around and leaving him to sort out his own damned mess.
    Instead, lips tight with impatience, she scanned the shadowy corners. Could he be passed out on the floor in one of them? Narrowing her eyes and focusing on the darkest part of the room, she pressed the redial button on her phone so it would call him back and pinpoint his (or the