She ignored me again. “Everything makes me cry and I itch. I itch so bad.”

“Do I… want to know where you’re itching?”

“Nasty. My stomach. Aiden’s been rubbing coconut oil on me every hour he’s here.”

I tried to imagine her six-foot-five-inch, Hercules-sized husband doing that to Van, but my imagination wasn’t that great. “Is he doing okay?” I asked, knowing off our past conversations that while he’d been over the moon with her pregnancy, he’d also turned into mother hen supreme. It made me feel better knowing that she wasn’t living in a different state all by herself with no one else for support. Some people in life got lucky and found someone great, the rest of us either took a long time… or not ever.

“He’s worried I’m going to fall down the stairs when he isn’t around, and he’s talking about getting a one-story house so that I can put him out of his misery.”

“You know you can come stay with us if you want.”

She made a noise.

“I’m just offering, bitch. If you don’t want to be alone when he starts traveling more for games, you can stay here as long as you need. Louie doesn’t sleep in his room half the time anyway, and we have a one-story house. You could sleep with me if you really wanted to. It’ll be like we’re fourteen all over again.”

She sighed. “I would. I really would, but I couldn’t leave Aiden.”

And I couldn’t leave the boys for longer than a couple of weeks, but she knew that. Well, she also knew I couldn’t not work for that long, too.

“Maybe you can get one of those I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up—”

Vanessa let out another loud laugh. “You jerk.”

“What? You could.”

There was a pause. “I don’t even know why I bother with you half the time.”

“Because you love me?”

“I don’t know why.”

“Tia,” Louie hissed, rubbing his belly like he was seriously starving.

“Hey, Lou and Josh are making it seem like they haven’t eaten all day. I’m scared they might start nibbling on my hand soon. Let me feed them, and I’ll call you back, okay?”

Van didn’t miss a beat. “Sure, Di. Give them a hug from me and call me back whenever. I’m on the couch, and I’m not going anywhere except the bathroom.”

“Okay. I won’t call Parks and Wildlife to let them know there’s a beached whale—”

“Goddammit, Diana—”

I laughed. “Love you. I’ll call you back. Bye!”

“Vanny has a whale?” Lou asked.

I tugged on his earlobe. “God, you’re nosey. No, she’s having a baby, remember? And I told her she is a whale right now.”

He made a funny face. “That’s not nice.”

“No, it’s not, but she knows I’m playing. Come on then and grab an onion and celery for me.”

“Celery?” He scrunched up his face.

I repeated myself, getting a nod from him before he turned to get what I asked of him.

I had just started slipping my phone back into my pocket when it started ringing again. I had no idea that in about two minutes, I would be calling myself an idiot for not looking at the screen before I hit the answer button without looking. My muscles had the placement memorized, so I didn’t have to. “Did you fall over already?” I joked.

“Diana?” the female voice came over the phone. The voice sounded familiar. “Don’t hang up—”

And just like a slap to the face, I realized why it was familiar. Smiling at Louie, I said in a bright voice, “You have the wrong number.” And I hung up even as my heart started going double-time.

She had called me maybe once over the last two years—once—and this was the second time she’d called in less than two weeks. I wanted to wonder why she would be calling now of all times, but I knew why. The why was probably in the living room setting up his Xbox for a game.

The thing was there were plenty of things in life you couldn’t escape, including the stupidest thing someone you loved very much did.

“Tia, the trash is full.”

Hopefully, my smile didn’t look as fake as it felt and Louie wasn’t paying enough attention to me to notice it was. The second to last person who needed to know who just called was Louie. “I’ll change it real quick then. Wash that for me, would you, Goo?” I asked, already heading toward the trash can as a ball of dread formed in my belly. He wasn’t big enough to lift the bag out of the can; we’d learned that the hard way, so I didn’t mind being the person in charge of taking it out.

I shoved the phone call aside until later when I was in bed, alone without anyone to see me freaking out.

In no time, I took the bag out and replaced it with a new one, carrying the old one out the kitchen door to dump it in the big trash can outside. I had seriously just taken the first step down toward the trash cans when I heard, “—take your ass and go.”

Say what?

I stopped in place, fully aware that my fence was only a four-foot-tall chain-link one that anyone on the street could see through. A female voice hollered, “You’re a piece of fucking shit, Dallas!”

Dallas as in my neighbor? Was it the lady in the red car out there talking?

“You’re not telling me something you haven’t called me a thousand times before,” the male voice drawled in a loose laugh that somehow didn’t really sound very carefree at all. Jesus. How loud were they talking that I could hear their conversation so clearly?