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time.
    Her parents had never understood that. They still didn’t. They loved her, but they couldn’t understand why she didn’t marry someone like Billy Wardinski next door and settle down to the kind of life they knew. Neither her two sisters nor the other girls in town had had a problem marrying young and cranking out the kids. It was simply the way things were supposed to be. Good Polish-American girls didn’t run off to Sin City. And they sure as hell didn’t wear next to nothing and do splits and high kicks on a stage.
    â€œWhat on earth are you thinking about?”
    She shot her friend a crooked smile. “How grateful I am that my folks only caught the eight-o’clock show that one time I got them to visit me out here.”
    Carly grinned. “Yeah, the costumes we wore in that show appalled them enough as it was.”
    â€œâ€˜Almost wore’ is how Pop put it. Can you imagine his reaction if he’d seen me without my top? Never mind that I was thirty-two years old at the time. He probably would have dragged me home by my hair.”
    â€œSpeaking of costumes—or sort of, anyway—did I tell you what Rufus did to my brand-new charactershoes?” Carly launched into a story about her newest baby, an abandoned mixed-breed puppy she’d rescued from the side of I-15 near the California border. They chatted about him all the way to the garage.
    Treena forgot Julie-Ann’s enmity, her parents’ baffled disapproval of her lifestyle and her own steadily growing financial and professional woes. Instead, her lips curved up, remembering the way Big Jim had once asked her if she and Carly had ever run out of things to talk about. Because the fact was they hadn’t, not from the first moment they’d met more than eleven years ago, at an open audition for la Stravaganza. They’d simply clicked and their only real problem during the intervening years had been narrowing down topics for discussion.
    When she was alone in her car a short while later with nothing to distract her, however, Treena’s problems came crowding back in on her. She managed to ignore them for a while when she arrived home by launching straight into one of her periodic cleaning frenzies. Then she found the baseball atop one of the piles in her messy coat closet. Picking up the Plexiglas box in which it was ensconced, she sat back on her heels and gazed at it with disparate emotions.
    The antique baseball had been one of Big Jim’s most treasured possessions. It was a rare collectible, a 1927 World Series home-run baseball that his then-twelve-year-old father had snagged out of the air at one of the games and gotten autographed by everyone on “Murderers’ Row,” the famous New York Yankees lineup. It was worth a small fortune, but it was remembering Jim’s pleasure in it that elicited the true surge of satisfaction. For him, the ball’s value had lain more in its sports history and the fact that it was a family heir-loom.
    A greedy little kernel inside of her was anything but satisfied, however, and setting the case carefully back where she’d found it, she left the cramped space for another day’s cleanup and backed out of the closet, firmly closing the door between herself and temptation. For what felt like the hundredth time, she rehashed the phone call she’d received a week ago from a lawyer named Richardson. He’d been authorized by an unnamed client to make her an offer for the ball, and the amount tendered had simply boggled her mind.
    The prospect of all that money had been more seductive than anything she could ever remember. As Carly had pointed out earlier, she had worked hard her whole life, and even after she’d left home at eighteen, she’d continued working two jobs. She hadn’t dropped the second one until she’d built up a little nest egg after landing the la Stravaganza gig at the Avventurato Resort Hotel and