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way with all targets. All enemies. Identify and obliterate.
    A stunned expression bloomed on Eva’s face. It was a slow motion kind of thing. Her lips parted, almost like a starburst. Her eyes flared. But then they filled with liquid.
    “You’re not going to cry, Eva.” It was an order. “You’re definitely not going to cry.”
    “I’m not, ” she agreed, her eyelashes fluttering. She rubbed a hand under her nose and pulled herself together. “It’s just, you never talk about her.”
    “I know.”
    “Ever.”
    “Not much to say.”
    “Not true.”
    “You’re right,” he said. “I should have dealt with it. I’m dealing with it now.”
    “Why?”
    “She’s holding me back.”
    “Unfinished business,” Eva said. She nodded her understanding.
    “Yeah, but what unfinished business?” Because it was more than unfulfilled dreams. There were times when he felt like he was wearing blinders, and he wanted to rip the damn things off and just deal with the reality and move on.
    “You were so young,” Shae said. “My age when she died.”
    Ethan nodded. Tina had been Ethan’s high school sweetheart. They’d started dating in the tenth grade. He had put an engagement ring on her finger before boot camp. On first leave, he’d followed through with his promise. They’d wed in a grassy park, with a sword ceremony and a catered surf-n-turf reception. And thirty days later he had left again, taking his bride with him to South Carolina, where he’d been stationed for six months for training before beginning his first tour of duty in the Middle East, and where Tina had drifted like a hot house flower among pond lilies.
    He should have moved her back to San Diego, but he had no idea what that first deployment was going to be like, and by the time he returned, she’d had a job and friends.
    “If Dylan died, I’d feel lost,” Eva said. “I’d feel cheated.”
    “Why?”
    She was silent, surprised by his question. Or by the intensity in his voice. “A whole life together, wiped out.” She waved her hand. “No happily ever after.  No starter home and fabric swatches. No children and mini vans, happy holiday meals or camping trips. . .of course, you didn’t have that anyway, did you?”
    He and Tina had five years, three months. Most of it separated by miles, the end separated by something more than geography.
    “No,” he agreed. “And I get all that. I felt that.” But there was something else. Probably the fall out of betrayal—Tina’s or his?
    But that wasn’t something he discussed with his baby sister. In any case, she was slipping into her own situation.
    “I love Dylan’s laughter. It was the first thing I noticed about him, and the most sustaining. If I had to return home to a silent house, it would kill me.” She pulled her cell phone from her pocket and dialed. “You know how some people say they hear the chains of ghosts moving in their homes? I would hear Dylan’s laughter. It would haunt me. Because it would always be out of reach.”
    And that was it. Ethan was haunted, not by a wife who had died too soon, but by her willingness to go so easily. Somewhere along the way, Ethan had stopped being important to her, and he wanted to know why.

 
    Chapter Three 
    Absolute Cinema Productions. Shae did a quick Google se arch on Ethan Abrams. Of course it brought up a plethora of images, from his high school year book mug shot to caught-in-the-clinch photos of the director with beautiful women. None of them, that Shae could find, featured a starlet or a matron of the arts. In fact, he didn’t seem to go for the tall, willowy super model or the hit-me-in-the-heart singer-songwriters he rubbed elbows with. He didn’t climb to his position in Hollywood by slithering through the beds of the established elite. He’d sweated his way in, first as a consultant on anything and everything military, foreign policy, or international conflict, working with big names and in small places. He’d