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Ten minutes later, Gabby pulled into the alley behind her house Exhaling gustily, she slung her purse over her shoulder, grabbed her briefcase, her gy stack of files that hadn’t fit in the briefcase because she needed a lot of work to get her through the weekend sane, then balanced her coffee on top of it all, wedging the plastic lid firmly beneath the underside of her chin to hold it all steady

Shecontrol of the unwieldy load

Files slipped one way, the briefcase the other, then the coffee went, tu from beneath her chin, bounced off an end table, knocked over a pile of books and azines, and drenched it all with dark, iced liquid

Cursing under her breath, she began snatching coffee-stained files from the floor

And that hen she saw it

Since the day she’d gotten ho the turret library, refusing to go in, in no frahan Books of the Fae

Not even noticing that all this ti on the end table near the sofa

It was now facedown in a puddle of coffee

It was going to be ruined!

She pounced on it, snatched it from the thick, muddy spill of icy liquid, and frantically dabbed it off on the sofa, heedless of theof the flowered upholstery

Thue

And as Fate--which Gabby was seriously beginning to believe ont to ly innocuous cups of coffee--would have it, the slender black toant, arrogant, slanted cursive She read it once, twice, a third ti as the words slammed into her

I will never stay with another human woman and watch her die Never

And there it was

Her answer had been there all along