Sullenly, Kimberley put them on. “I hate you,” she said, and then, as if that had been a rehearsal, found something worse: “Daddy and Dawn never yell at me.”

Only four, and she knew just where to stick the knife.

Nicole stalked out of her daughter’s bedroom, tight-lipped and quivering with rage she refused to show. As she strode past the nightstand on her way into the master bathroom, she glared at Liber and Libera – especially at Liber. The god and goddess, their hair cut in almost identical pageboy bobs, stared serenely back, as they had for… how long?

She grasped at that thought – any straw in a storm, any distraction before she lost it completely. The label on the back of the limestone plaque said in German, English, and French that it was a reproduction of an original excavated from the ruins of Carnuntum, the Roman city on the site of Petronell, the small town east of Vienna where she’d bought it. Every now and then, she wondered about that. None of the other reproductions in the shop had looked quite so… antique. But none of the Customs men had given her any grief about it. If they didn’t know, who did?

As a distraction, it was a failure. When she stood in front of the makeup mirror, the modern world came crashing back. Fury had left her cheeks so red, she almost decided to leave off the blusher. But she knew what would happen next: the blood would drain away and leave them pasty white, and she’d look worse than ever. When she’d done the best she could with foundation and blusher, eyeliner and mascara and eyebrow pencil, lip liner and lipstick, she surveyed the results with a critical eye.