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“I’m fine,” he assured. “Just old. What day works for you?”
    “Any,” I replied as I tried to hand him what was left of my winnings from my bets with Julie. He shook his head, which scared me even more. The only time he’d ever turned down any money was the previous December, when I had lost a week of work because I got sick with the flu just before rent came due. Since I came up short, he let me skip the month to recover. It had been the most amazing Christmas gift ever, proving he had developed quite a soft spot for me. I saw that once again in those warm, dark eyes.
    “Saturday at ten. Okay?”
    I nodded, but my mood had effectively flat-lined by the time I lumbered up the narrow stairs to my apartment on the second floor.
    There were four studio apartments there. One was rented by an aspiring screenwriter who was already going bald at twenty-seven. I barely saw him. Whenever he wasn’t down the street at the local coffee shop typing away on his newest creation, he was networking through groups and classes around town.
    Another was rented by a woman and her two children, who had escaped domestic abuse by the hair of their teeth, and were now living hand to mouth in a tight little space. I heard them more than I saw them, though I had taken them some extra blankets and linens when they moved in because they had precious little else.
    Unit B was occupied by a man so old and so deaf that his constantly running TV could be heard from the stairwell. Since he was the neighbor right next to me in Unit A, I never bothered to get a TV of my own. I could hear everything I needed to hear through the thin walls. Sure it was mostly old TV classics, but it was entertaining. I was pretty sure I could quote M*A*S*H word for word.
    I let myself into the tiny apartment that I kept fastidious and neat. Thanks to Clem, I had decorated the modest space with light and color, with funky old hipster furniture, and all my favorite art on the walls. A print of my favorite piece, Hopper’s Night Hawks , was mounted on the wall right across from my sofa-bed. Who needed a TV when I could just stare at that masterpiece for hours?
    I routinely lost myself in the image, imagining what life would have been like in New York in the 1940s. Having transplanted to a huge city, where I lived in some shoe box of an apartment, right in the midst of things but still gloriously removed, that stark, lonely piece spoke to me. Many times it rendered me melancholy, though I wasn’t sure why. I found that I kind of liked the feeling. It hurt, but the hurt felt good, like I was struggling to remember a past life, the remnants of which lingering somewhere in my subconscious. When I felt it, really, really felt it, I was occupying both lives at the same time.
    I opened my laptop to queue up some dinner music and check my social media accounts, which is where my appetite, and my mood, took an immediate nosedive. In a heartbeat I knew things had just gone from chaotic to catastrophic.
    It had taken a few years, but Eli’s tenuous cover had finally been blown. PING, the carnivorous gossip media group, had broken the news first, because they always broke the news first.
     
    DOES ELI BLAKE SECRETLY HATE ALLTHE FAT GIRLS HE SINGS ABOUT? EX-SQUEEZE RHONDA ESPOSITO SPILLS ALL!
     
    I groaned as I planted my face into my hands.
    It was going to be a long week.
     

CHAPTER TWO
     
     
    Though I arrived at the office an hour early, the place was already abuzz as Frank and Eli attempted a little damage control. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Eli had been trending all night long, which, normally, was something that we wanted to happen. In fact, that was a big part of my job to make it so.
    Now, thanks to a very irate and vindictive Rhonda, who had gone straight to PING with all she knew about Eli the second she left our offices the previous afternoon, the allegations trending were cringe-worthy. It covered everything from secret things he had said about some of his