Page 100 of Where There's Smoke

“Oh, I don’t doubt that at all. It’s just that when mine don’t work out romantically, they do so in the same way shotgun blasts don’t work out well with human flesh.”

I laughed. “Such a way with words, my dear.”

“It’s true, though. My breakups are always cataclysmic. You should have seen how things went down with my ex-fiancé.” She grimaced.

“I don’t even want to know.”

“No, you don’t. Trust me, he and I are not on speaking terms anymore.”

“Yeah, well, here’s hoping I can at least stay on speaking terms with my ex-wife,” I said. “Maybe not as friendly asthem”—my, my, how one word could taste so sour—“but speaking terms.”

Ranya’s lips thinned, and she stared into her drink.

I ran my fingertip around the rim of my glass. “Something wrong?”

For a moment, she didn’t speak. The crevices between her eyebrows deepened, and the silence went on. I chewed the inside of my cheek, not sure if I wanted to prod her to say what was on her mind or let her keep it unspoken as long as she needed to.

Finally she folded her hands behind her glass and looked at me. Her expression was unusually serious, completely devoid of the mischievous spark that had, I thought, taken up permanent residence in her eyes.

“I sincerely hope you and Simone stay on speaking terms,” she said softly. “At the very least, you two have a friendship that most people would kill for.”

I swallowed. “But…?”

“But…” She leaned forward, resting her arms on the table. “And maybe I’m out of line for saying this, but the way things are going, you’re seriously asking to lose both Simone and Anthony.”

Ice crackled along my nerve endings. “Is that right?”

She nodded. “Honestly, I think you guys—all of you—are heading for something catastrophic.”

“In what way?”

“You’ve got, well, what you and Anthony have going on,” she said, ticking off the points on her fingers. “Then there’s Simone. She’s your wife, she knows the truth about you, and she’s fucking miserable.”

My stomach tried to jump into my throat. “As much as she insists she’s not.”

“Honey, you’ve been married long enough to know that when a woman says ‘I’m fine,’ she’s not.”

“Yeah, I know.” I sighed. “But with her, I… I just don’t know. But we’ve been through that.”

“We have,” she said with a nod. “So there’s your relationship, your marriage, whatever’s going on with her and Dean—”

“You think she and Dean are really—”

“If those two aren’t together,” she said, “I will become a vegetarian and take up smoking.”

I blinked.

“Call it woman’s intuition.” Her tone and expression turned serious again. “But yes, there is definitely something going on there. So with all that shit going on, plus the election, plus the media’s obsession with celebrities and who they’re doing…Jesse, sweetie, this isnotgoing to end well at all.”

I forced out a breath and sat back in my chair, letting my head fall back. “I don’t imagine it will. I’m just not sure what to do about it without making things worse.”

“I wish I knew,” she said, almost whispering.

“I guess it would simplify things if Anthony and I called it—”

“Oh, don’t even.”

“What?”

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