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introduce you to Ethan’s cousin, but that obviously never happened.”  She sounded slightly annoyed with me.
    “I got…distracted, and then—then that alarm went off and I had to get out just like everyone else.  Neil saw me and knew I’d made it out safely.  And once we were outside the building there was nothing to do but stand around, so I grabbed the first cab I could and went home. I just wanted a shower and my bed. It was a weird night.”
    “You’re so right about that.”
    “Benny called , too. He saw it on the news and was worried about us. I talked to him for a long time.  Really, Bree, I am fine,” I stressed, hoping she bought my story.
    “Okay …if you say so.”  She didn’t sound very convinced.
    “I do want to meet Ethan’s cousin with the old paintings someday, though. Maybe you can arrange it,” I said by way of a peace offering.
    “Yeah, maybe .  Listen, I gotta go, Gab.  Someone is here. I’ll talk to you later and I’ll see what I can do about sending a pic of the Mallerton. Love ya.”
    “Love ya back .”
    I powered off my phone after I said goodbye to Brynne.  I needed to.
    It was time for some serious introspection of my life.  I couldn’t afford to allow myself to go off on an emotional bender right now.  I had school and work to occupy my time, and as for family, well, there was plenty to focus on there, too.
    My sister Danielle still lived in Santa Barbara and went to school there despite our dad wanting her to come live in London like I had done.  I wished she would, too.  I worried about her there without us because I suspected she wasn’t telling me everything that was going on.  I had nobody I could really reach out to for accurate information, either.  Our mom, Jillian, had lived in Santa Barbara with her husband, a man I refused to acknowledge as my step-father, until her sudden death three years ago.  A man who wanted to get his claws into my sister and me, just as he had done to our mother.  Garrick Chamberlain was no father of mine, and I didn’t trust him further than I could throw him.  Which was not at all.
    But he was the father of my nineteen-year-old brother, Blake.
    If I called him to ask about Dani or Blake, he’d just guilt me into a tailspin for leaving and living in London when I should be home in the US where I belonged with my family.  It wasn’t the true reason he wanted me home, but it didn’t matter to me.  I didn’t allow Garrick to influence me, ever.  Or at least I gave it my very best shot not to let him into my orbit.
    My mother and father were married for only three years.  They met at a Peter Gabriel concert when she’d lived in London with her diplomat parents who’d been assigned to the embassy there.  They’d fallen into a passionate romance, which I suspect was something from which neither of them ever fully recovered.  I was born when she was just nineteen, and I’m sure only because she never told her parents she was pregnant until it was too late for an abortion.
    My grandparents may not have been able to stop me from being born, but they made sure my mom and dad never got the c hance to make a life together.  My grandmother swept my mom and me back to Santa Barbara and out of my dad’s influence until the marriage quietly ended.  She was pregnant with my sister when she left England.  Dani and I probably would never have had a chance to really know our dad if my grandparents hadn’t been killed in a car accident when I was six.  My dad started enforcing his visitation after they were gone, and we began spending our school holidays in London with him.  When we were little, his mother, my Granny Anne, helped him with us when we came to England to stay.  I’ve always imagined how remarkable it was for my dad to have gone above and beyond in being a parent to two tiny girls when it must have been so scary for him trying to do it all alone, and while living on another continent to boot. 
    The death of