Considering that she’d been on them more than off them all day, that wasn’t a surprise. She absently rubbed the arch of her right foot under the kitchen table at her parents’ house in the upscale twelve-block Garden District, close to the French Quarter yet worlds away. She sipped her herbal tea, the contents of the growing file in front of her beginning to blur. It was nearly eight o’clock and the big house was starting its slow wind down. Akela could tell exactly what time it was by the sounds that she heard. By the voice on the news channel that came from her father’s library down the hall. By the maid, Gisella, moving around her quarters on the other side of the kitchen. By the running water upstairs as her mother began her nightly beauty regimen. Well, usually her mother would have begun her hour-long regular routine. But Akela’s return a month ago had upset the delicate balance of the household. Rather than smearing cold cream on her face, her mother, Patsy Brooks, was now reading to Akela’s four-year-old daughter, Daisy, in the double canopy bed Patsy had had delivered the instant she’d learned her only daughter was finally coming home.
