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stepped inside. She pushed the button for the third floor and leaned against the wall while the elevator rose.
    Besides cutting, Taylor had been experimenting with alcohol and marijuana, skipping class, and generally isolating herself from the friends she had treasured only a few months before, hanging with a new crowd that wasn’t a stellar influence. Actually, everything had started to fall apart for Taylor.
    At first Taylor’s parents had thought that it was just a phase, something Taylor would grow out of, like Pretty Ponies and the Backstreet Boys. Then Stacey had walked in on her daughter in the bathroom, seen the cuts on Taylor’s thighs and breasts, and panicked.
    Orrin Dawkin had been concerned but had remained calm, possibly even a little bit detached. It was hard for some fathers to stay connected with their teenaged daughters. All those hormones, all that burgeoning sexuality. It changed everything.
    The elevator doors opened and Aimee glanced up and down the hallway as she stepped out. Empty. No surprise there, at five-thirty in the morning. She walked to her apartment, where she clicked the lock shut behind her and put on the security chain. Her tight shoulders and neck relaxed and she sagged against the door, glad to be back safe in her cocoon.
    It would be pointless to go back to bed now. She wouldn’t sleep, even though she was exhausted. She set her keys on the table by the door and headed to the kitchen. Acid churned in her stomach, and the thought of coffee made her a little queasy. Toast, she decided. A little comfort food. One of her clients, a middle-aged woman coping with the stresses of being trapped in the sandwich generation with elderly parents and dependent children, had described eating more than a dozen English muffins at one sitting as a way to deal with having to take her mother to the cancer center one more time. She’d talked about melted butter the way Aimee had heard junkies talk about heroin.
    Aimee didn’t get a butter-high, but the toast did help settle her stomach. She put the coffee on.
    A knock at the door made her jump. She looked through the peephole. Damn, she’d forgotten to call Simone. There was no way she was going running this morning.
    Aimee undid the chain and the deadbolt and let her friend in.
    “You’re not dressed,” Simone said, clearly dismayed. She had on running tights and a tank top and was bouncing on the toes of her running shoes. “Well, I mean, you are dressed. Just in the wrong stuff.”
    Aimee smiled. “Do you want some coffee?”
    “Are the novels of Cormac McCarthy pretentious and misogynistic?” Simone replied, following Aimee into the kitchen.
    “You are so going to have to get over him winning the Pulitzer.” Aimee grabbed two mugs from the cabinet.
    “No, I don’t. It’s a bone I’ll be able to gnaw on for the rest of my natural life.” Simone sighed as she sat at the granite counter and looked around at the open loft. “Your place is always so clean. I want my house to be this neat and restful.”
    “You should probably have thought about that before you had the three kids and adopted the two dogs.” Aimee poured two cups of coffee and pulled the half-and-half out of the refrigerator.
    “I also wish I had your metabolism, and could have half-and-half and not gain weight.” Simone poured a liberal amount of cream in her coffee anyway. She was two inches shorter than Aimee and about ten pounds heavier, but she carried it in all the right places.
    “I gain plenty of weight.” Aimee sat down at the counter, braced her elbows on it, and covered her eyes, which suddenly felt scratchy.
    “Rough night?” Simone asked.
    “You could say that,” Aimee replied from behind her hands. “A two a.m. phone call about a client.”
    Simone’s nose wrinkled. “Bummer. Say what you will about the sorrows of writing copy for the biology department’s newsletter, they never have middle-of-the-night emergencies. Was it bad?”
    Aimee nodded.