Maybe my exhaustion inserted them there. Or maybe not. I did ask again where he’d been. I said I’d stumbled against the Escalade on my way into his house and had noticed its engine was warm. Wasn’t that an indication it had been driven recently? “Sure,” he replied breezily as we completed our procession to his bedroom. “I took the dogs for a ride when I got home. We stopped for a treat: ice cream for me, the cone for them.” I glanced at the adorable beggars by our feet. If they knew that wasn’t the truth, they weren’t barking about it. We all went to bed—together in the same room. In the same bed, even. And without Jeff and I indulging in hanky-panky that awfully early hour of the morning, we slept. Sort of. Even as tired as I was, I couldn’t quite turn off my brain. Maybe someday someone would invent a remote control for the mind, like the kind you can just point at your TV and, pop, off it goes, into suspended animation. I needed one that night. Too much mischief kept teasing my thoughts, and now it was all underscored by Jeff’s soft, rhythmic snores.
