her maiden name rather than Upjohn. Then later, she and Kurt had divorced anyway. The story went something like that. Liv had never quite got it in full detail, but it didn’t really matter. She’d never wanted to question Aaron further because that would have given him carte blanche to ask her about herself and she didn’t want to go there. Ever.
“You’re kinda in a fog. C’mon, let’s go out back and have a smoke,” Aaron said.
“I’ve got some work to catch up on.” She wasn’t interested in smoking anything, especially Aaron’s type of cigarettes.
“Bullshit. You work too hard as it is. You’re giving the rest of us slackers a bad name.”
“The boss is your father. You can get away with it. I can’t.”
“People are starting to hate you around here, you know that? You gotta come with me.”
He wasn’t going to take no for an answer, and he’d been known to actually pull her out of her chair to get her to comply, so she reluctantly got to her feet. Truthfully, she really didn’t take enough breaks, according to the law, so she followed him to the back door on the first floor and outside to the enclosed patio-type area, with its overhang and its gate that led to the employee parking lot. Her blue Accord was three in, facing out as if ready to take off.
Aaron normally stuffed a brick-sized rock in the door to keep it ajar, but today he actually pulled out a key and unlocked it from the outside, so that the door would stay open until he relocked it.
“Where’d you get that?” Liv asked.
“Kinda lifted it,” he admitted. “Don’t worry. I’ll lock up before we leave tonight. I just can’t stand walking by that asshole de Fore every time I want to breathe some fresh air.” He shot her a quick smile as he pulled a joint and lighter from his pants pocket.
Aaron liked to smoke “maree-wanna,” as he called it. Liv stayed away from all drugs; she’d been encouraged to take enough during her yearlong treatment at Hathaway House to last her a lifetime and then some. She liked a clear head and, apart from a very occasional drink, mostly steered clear of alcohol, too.
“You don’t say much,” Aaron observed with a sideways look as he belched out a lungful of smoke. “I like that about you. Although you’re kind of shut down.”
Remembering her six-year-old self, Liv felt a pang of sorrow for the loss of the independent, headstrong little girl she’d once been. That girl had apparently died along with her mother.
She stood to one side, leaning against the gate to the parking lot, gazing out. Occasionally she’d left the building this way when Aaron had propped open the door. She completely agreed with him that bypassing Paul de Fore was worth breaking some rules. Paul was just one of those guys no one could stand, the type who took his job too seriously and made it hell on everyone else.
Being too serious, though, wasn’t Aaron’s problem.
“Tell me something about yourself,” Aaron said now. He had long hair and wore a plaid shirt over a T-shirt, slacker-style. It hardly mattered since his dad was the boss, but truthfully the programmers and game designers who were on the upstairs floor kind of dressed the same way. Slacker, hacker, computer techie, video game designer . . . there seemed to be an unspoken dress code with them that thumbed its nose at accepted business attire.
Only Liv and Jessica Maltona dressed in legitimate office wear: skirts or slacks, blouses, vests, jackets, sensible shoes, tasteful jewelry and makeup. Paul de Fore wore a navy shirt and pants as if it were a security uniform though there was really no such dictum.
“Well, I’m a Leo,” she said. “I like Italian food and expensive coffee and live in an apartment with a three-hundred-pound cat.”
Aaron coughed out some smoke on a laugh. Liv had never so much as hinted that she might have a personality and she’d taken him by surprise. She wasn’t even sure why she’d said it. She’d just wanted . . . to not be so serious for once.
“Cool. What’s the cat’s name?” he asked.
“Tiny.”
He grinned at her and Liv smiled back at him. It was the most playful conversation they’d had to date and though Liv was simply talking to talk, Aaron peered at her as if she were something he’d just discovered.
“Who are you?” he asked. “You’re too good-looking to be this mousy bookkeeper you want us all to think you are.”
Too good-looking? She had straight brown hair, hazel eyes and a mouth and jaw that were set too tightly, or so she’d been told. “I’m kind of average-looking.”
“Look in the mirror, sometime.”
She shook her head. Whenever she looked in the mirror she saw a woman with anxious eyes whose personal life was nonexistent and whose professional one was practically invisible, too.
He flapped a hand at her and sucked in his last toke. “You’re good-looking and you’re too serious. You should have some of this.” He held out the teensy little end of the joint.
“Nah.”
“Or a glass or two of wine, or a few mojitos, or some Xanax. You just need to let go.” He pushed on the gate and let himself into the back parking lot.
“You’re going to piss off your father by ignoring security,” she warned him.
“A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do. You go out this way sometimes, too.”
It was true. Though Liv generally played by the rules, there was this inner part of her that occasionally liked to flout authority. Most of the time she pretended it wasn’t there. But sometimes it stretched and peered around like a waking beast, looking to prowl. Was it because she’d spent time constrained by others? Or, the fact that the police had left an indelible impression on her since her mother’s death, and not a good one. Or, maybe it was just a side of her personality that she mostly ignored and that surprised her and others now and again when it suddenly popped up. She wasn’t the meek worker bee everyone thought she was, though she took pains to make others see her that way. A kind of camouflage, like an animal’s coat or a bird’s feathers.
By the time she left work she still hadn’t opened the package and when she got back to the apartment she dropped it on the kitchen counter while she threw together a quick meal—a microwavable TV dinner with limited calories and limited taste; her eating habits hadn’t evolved over the years, either.
She went to bed at ten-thirty and stared up at the ceiling through the dark. She could hear the comfortable sounds of the refrigerator humming and the tinny voices from her neighbor’s television, which seemed to be right behind her head, set against the paper-thin wall that separated their units, her bedroom butting up against theirs.
She fell asleep, then came to abruptly at midnight, wondering what had woken her. There was moaning from behind the wall. It had been her neighbor Jo’s last climactic shriek during lovemaking—something that happened regularly enough—that had penetrated her sleep.
Sleep . . . That’s what some people called it, though Liv was pretty sure her sleep was different than others’; she’d learned that over the years. Hers was disturbed by images that kept coming back, creeping into a dream that had nothing to do with whatever the dream
