Blue Smoke

onto his plate. “Fate’s a mean bastard.”

13
BALTIMORE, 2005
    For better or worse, it was done. Reena’s heart was pounding, her throat bone-dry, and at the base of her belly was a little tickle that could have been panic or excitement.
    She’d bought herself a house.
    She stood on the white marble steps, the keys in her clammy hand. Settlement was over, the papers were signed. She had a mortgage.
    And a bank loan, she thought, that stretched out so long she’d be ready for retirement when it was paid off.
    Did the math, didn’t you? she reminded herself. You can make this work. It was time she owned property. Oh God, she was a property owner.
    And hadn’t she fallen in love with this house? It was so like home. What that said about her, she wasn’t entirely sure, but it had been love at first sight. Everything about it had called to her.
    The location, the familiarity, even the slightly tired interior that just begged her to liven it up, her way. It even had a backyard—maybe it was narrow enough to spit from line to line, but it was an actual yard with actual grass. It even had a tree.

    Which meant she’d have to mow grass and rake leaves, which meant buying a lawn mower. And a rake. But for a woman who’d lived in apartments for the last ten years, it was heady stuff.
    So, here she was, moving into a three-story row, three short blocks from the house where her parents still lived.
    Still in the neighborhood, she thought. And as distant as the moon.
    But it was good. It was all good. Hadn’t the uncles, along with her father, inspected the place top to bottom? There’d been no stopping them. Needed a little fixing up, sure. And more furniture than she could currently claim.
    But that would all come.
    All she had to do was put the key in the lock and walk through the door, and she’d be standing in her own house.
    Instead, she turned around, sat on the steps and waited to get her breath back.
    She’d taken a big bite of her savings, plus the generous lump of dough her grandparents had given her—and the rest of the grands.
    Now look what I’ve done. Gone into debt. And didn’t a house keep siphoning away money? Insurance, taxes, repairs, upkeep. She’d managed to avoid all that up till now. Those pesky details had gone from being her parents’ problem to her landlords’ problem.
    Never hers.
    Managed to avoid all that, she thought, and most every other kind of commitment. She had the job and her family, friends she’d kept from childhood.
    But she was the only unmarried Hale. The only child of Gibson and Bianca Hale yet to go forth and multiply. Not enough time, that’s what she told her family if they teased or pressed the matter. Haven’t found the right man.
    True, all true. But how many times had she retreated from—or just sidestepped—a potential relationship in the last few years?
    Dating was fine, sex was good, but don’t ask me to form an attachment. Xander said she thought like a man. Maybe it was true.

    And maybe she’d bought this house as a kind of compensation, the way some singles or no-children couples bought a puppy.
    See! I can make a commitment when I want to. I bought a house.
    A house, she admitted, she couldn’t seem to make herself enter now that everything was signed and sealed.
    Maybe she could just turn it over. Give it a slap of paint, fix it up here and there, then resell it. There was no law that said she had to keep it for thirty years.
    Thirty years. She pressed a hand to her belly. What had she done?
    She was thirty-one years old, damn it. She was a cop with a decade on the job. She could walk into a stupid house without having a crisis. Besides, some portion of her family was bound to descend before much longer, and she didn’t want to be caught sitting on the stairs having a neurotic attack.
    She stood up, unlocked the door and walked deliberately inside.
    Instantly, as if she’d popped a cork on a bottle labeled Stress, the tension drained out.
    The hell with mortgages and loans and the terror of picking out paint colors. This is what she’d wanted. This big, old, high-ceilinged place with its carved trim, its hardwood floors.
    Of course it was too much room for one person. She didn’t care. She’d use one of the bedrooms for storage, once she had enough to store. She’d make another into an office space, another into a home gym, and keep the last spare for a guest room.
    Ignoring the echoes, the emptiness, she strolled into the living room.