"You want me to go?"

She shook her head. "You have work. Come next time, when they do a sonogram."

"Okay."

Olivia kissed him again, her lips lingering. "Hey," she whispered. "You happy?"

He was going to crack a joke, make another double entendre. But he didn't. He looked straight into those eyes and said, "Very."

Olivia moved back, still holding him steady with that smile. "I better pack."

Matt watched her walk away. He stayed in the doorway for another moment. There was a lightness in his chest. He was indeed happy, which scared the hell out of him. The good is fragile. You learn that when you kill a boy. You learn that when you spend four years in a maximum-security facility.

The good is so flimsy, so tenuous, that it can be destroyed with a gentle puff.

Or the sound of a phone.

Matt was at work when the camera phone vibrated.

He glanced at the caller ID and saw that it was Olivia. Matt still sat at his old partner desk, the kind where two people face each other, though the other side had been empty for three years now. His brother, Bernie, had bought the desk when Matt got out of prison. Before what the family euphemistically called "the slip," Bernie had big ideas for the two of them, the Hunter Brothers. He wanted nothing to change now. Matt would put those years behind him. The slip had been a bump in the road, nothing more, and now the Hunter Brothers were back on track.

Bernie was so convincing that Matt almost started to believe it.

The brothers shared that desk for six years. They practiced law in this very room- Bernie lucrative corporate while Matt, barred from being a real attorney because he'd been a convicted felon, handled the direct opposite, neither lucrative nor corporate. Bernie's law partners found the arrangement odd, but privacy was something neither brother craved. They had shared a bedroom for their entire childhood, Bernie on the top bunk, a voice from above in the dark. Both longed for those days again- or at least, Matt did. He was never comfortable alone. He was comfortable with Bernie in the room.