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“Yes, Charlie, sixty.”

Charlie sighed. He mopped his brow. He tilted his head back and blew out a puff of breath at the ceiling.

Such a drama queen…

“Fine,” Charlie said. “Sixty.”

“I want you to remember that you specifically asked me to find you opportunities like this, Charlie,” Krissy reminded him.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Charlie conceded. “Herman told me you’re one of the best.”

“And have I ever steered you wrong?”

“Of course not.”

“Of course not,” Krissy reiterated. “And you have a nice shiny new yacht to prove it, don’t you?”

And a nice shiny new twenty-five-year-old wife also.

“True,” Charlie conceded.

“Then you should have no problem going up to seventy, then,” Krissy said.

Charlie started making choking sounds.

“What happened to fifty, which then became sixty?”

Krissy looked off to the side, making sure Charlie noticed it.

“I’m looking at what Shapiro and Heche are telling me,” she said. “And they’re saying the average buy-in is seventy-five million, Charlie.”

This was a lie. Krissy was actually looking at a new Louboutin tote handbag she wanted to buy herself on one of the six monitors she had installed in her home office, making the space look like Mission Control at NASA. The monitors were displaying stock data from several sources—sometimes in quad-screen format, often in multiple languages—or were tuned to the web streams of various financial news cable TV channels.

Krissy looked back at Charlie, giving him her best piercing stare.

“Big boys, Charlie,” she told him. “Do you realize how huge the difference in returns are going to be for those who put in seventy-five versus the pussies who only put in sixty? You’ll be able to buy a bigger yacht which will make the one you already have look like a rowboat.”

Charlie actually laughed, and Krissy knew she had won.

When the phone call ended—with Charlie buying into that new fund at seventy-five million—Krissy took off her headset and stood, stretching her back. Charlie was going to make a lot of money—which was her job. She wasn’t going to do too badly either. With another seventy-five million of assets under management, plus her annual fee, Charlie alone was definitely keeping Krissy in expensive handbags.

After buying the Louboutin tote to celebrate, Krissy looked at the clock. It was almost four p.m. and it was Friday. Time to get ready.

She DM-ed her assistant, who was also working from home today, telling her to enjoy her weekend. Then, she set about getting ready.

It was an important night.

At six o’clock, the Carlsbad Fire Department was having an awards ceremony at City Hall to honor the work Becca and all the other firefighters had done during that office tower fire one week ago. And apparently, Becca was getting a huge award—the Medal of Valor.

Krissy was really excited for this evening. She and Becca hadn’t seen each other since Monday morning, when they both left Becca’s house—Becca to spend twenty-four hours at the stationhouse; Krissy to head home and start her week of making already wealthy people like Charlie even wealthier.

After her aborted attempt to have casual sex with Riley on Wednesday night, Krissy had had to face her demons and deal with her paranoia and jealousy. This meant, all in all, it had been a miserable week. Krissy had been unable to do or enjoy the simplest things: read a book, watch a movie, sleep.

It hadn’t helped that Becca had been on duty yesterday and so Krissy had been unable to try to see her then also.

She just couldn’t help the thought running through her head.

What if Becca has started seeing someone?