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“Just come and get me. Please.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Annie said, and she was as good as her word. By the time she pulled her car into Chay’s driveway, Bianca was packed and waiting outside.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Bianca lucked out.

There was a red-eye to La Guardia and she got the last available seat.

It wasn’t a good seat. She sat jammed between a guy who unwrapped a salami sandwich when the plane reached cruising altitude, and a woman who must have bathed in a tub of cheap perfume.

It was hard to decide which smell was worse, but at least she was on her way home.

There was lots to think about, lots to plan, and Bianca wanted to hit the ground running.

She changed planes in Denver, crossed her fingers in hopes of getting a better seat, and ended up trapped between a man on her right who should have bought two tickets and one on her left who fell asleep as soon as the plane took off, and spent most of the flight snoring in her ear.

The plane touched down in a light drizzle.

Bianca hurried out of the terminal. Was rain going to accompany her through life?

She thought about taking the subway, but the idea of having to sit next to anybody else made her shudder, so she splurged on a taxi. It got stuck in traffic when she was half a dozen blocks from her apartment.

She’d tried to come up with a way of not going back to that apartment, but she needed her things.

Ten minutes and endless clicks of the meter later, she paid the driver, got out of the cab and walked the rest of the distance.

Her hands started to shake when she took out the key to her apartment.

“Stop being a wimp,” she said, and she jabbed the key into the lock.

The apartment was just as she’d left it, except there was dust everywhere.

A glass stood on the kitchen sink, still filled with the wine Chay had poured into it.

And, in the bedroom, the drawer, her underwear drawer, still stood open.

Bianca shuddered.

No. No, she could not stay here.

Quickly, she pulled her suitcase from the back of the closet, opened drawers, tore down hangers, plucked her shoes from the rack on the closet floor and dumped everything into the suitcase.

Not the underwear.

She would never touch any of it again.

The furniture? She’d hire a moving company to get it out of here. Her books? Dishes? Glasses? Pots and pans, towels, pictures, books…You could pay movers to pack your things, and that was what she would do. It would be expensive, but she’d earned a good living at East Side Associates and she wasn’t frivolous.

Alessandra always teased her about being frugal, but frugality was about to pay off.

She could afford to get out of here and let someone else worry about the packing.

She paused just long enough to pull the underwear drawer from the dresser, carry it into the kitchen and upend the contents into the trash. No way did she want some industrious moving guy to pack up the underwear and deliver it to her.

The suitcase was heavy, but she half-dragged, half-carried it to the street and hailed yet another cab.