Page 148 of Gamebreaker

The drive to Laine's took me back through the hills, winding roads cutting through neighborhoods where the houses got larger and the gates got taller and the views got wider, the city spreading out below in its nighttime grid of gold and white.

I knew this part of Fashion City better than I wanted to.

I turned onto a street and realized, three seconds too late, that I'd taken the route I always took, the one that curved up past the hilltop neighborhood where the houses were modern and the windows were floor-to-ceiling, and...

Cam's street.

I kept my eyes straight ahead with grim determination, like I was someone defusing a damn bomb. I did not look left. I did not look toward the house I'd stood outside of two weeks ago with my heart hammering and my keys in my hand, and the whole night stretched ahead of us like a promise we couldn't keep.

I looked.

Of course I looked.

One light was on. The kitchen, toward the back, a warm square in all that dark glass. The rest of the house was black.

She was home. She was sitting in that enormous, empty, beautiful house with one light on, alone, two nights after sweeping her way into the Finals. Not at a bar with her team. Not celebrating. Home, in the kitchen, in the one room I could picture her in so clearly it hurt. Standing at the counter with an espresso she wouldn't drink. Cooking for one. Staring at the wall.

My foot came off the gas.

The car slowed. Twenty miles an hour. Fifteen. I was almost to her driveway. It would be so easy. I could pull in. I could walk up to that door I'd been kissed against. I could knock, and she'd open it, and she'd look at me the way she'd looked at me at halftime, and I'd be in her arms before either of us said a word.

And then I'd be her secret.

I'd be the woman parked in her garage, so the neighbors wouldn't see the car. The woman who left before dawn. The woman she'd introduce as a friend.

I put my foot back on the gas.

The street passed. I watched the light in her kitchen shrink in my rearview mirror until the curve of the road took it away.

I breathed.

I kept driving.

"You're fine," I told myself, and my voice was shaking. "You drove past a street. Streets exist. You drove past one. Moving on."

My hands on the steering wheel were giving a very poor impression of calm.

Laine's house appeared out of the dark fifteen minutes later, and I turned into her driveway with profound relief. The Tudor facade rose up in the glow of carefully placed landscape lighting, dark timber framing and steep rooflines and ivy along the stone, which probably had a rich and storied history I'd never asked about, because every time I came here I was either celebrating or falling apart.

Tonight, it was the latter.

I rang the bell. Mia answered, already holding a glass of wine, which meant she'd been watching from the window.

"Don't," I said.

"I wasn't going to say a word."

"You had a look prepared."

"I had a concerned expression, which is not the same." She stepped aside to let me in.

Laine's home always got to me, in the best possible way. The entryway alone was an argument for the existence of good taste: dark hardwood floors, Art déco sconces casting warm brass light, a console table with legs that curved like they'd been borrowed from a 1930s Paris hotel. The living room beyond was anchored by an emerald velvet sofa that probably cost something extortionately high and somehow also looked like the most inviting place in Fashion City to have a breakdown. Deep greens and rich brass and dark wood, all of it deliberate and lush and quietly announcing that someone with an extraordinary eye lived here.

Laine was curled at one end of the sofa with her own wine, long legs tucked beneath her, looking the way she always looked, which was a woman who'd seen a great deal of the world and understood most of it. She was one of the most quietly perceptive people I'd ever met, which made sense for someone who'd built a career out of knowing what people needed before they knew it themselves.

She'd mostly stayed quiet on the subject of my current situation.

I had a feeling that was about to change.