Page 67 of Little Deaths

“Not as such, no,” Donni said.

“Well, it’s a start. Can you think of anyone else?”

“Just my former producer. But he died years ago.”

“Well, unless this is all being done by a ghost that won’t help. We’ll send someone out to talk to the Walters boy. Unless—say, did your producer have any relatives living in this area?”

“No. His wife divorced him and moved to Prague. And I think the son still lives in LA.” Donni folded her arms, thinking hard. “This is a long shot but a couple years ago, my husband and I had a pretty bad fight and he drove down to Brouchard’s and didn’t come back until morning. He went there pretty often. Maybe it’s possible he said the wrong thing to the wrong person? Especially with what happened with, um, his winery.”

“We’ll send someone down to the bar, too.”

The fire was quickly contained. Donni was told that she could stay in the house, though they recommended sealing the room off and opening a window to air out the smoke and fumes. And then they were gone, and the police, too, and she and Rafe were alone on the front lawn.

She went into the house, eyes stinging at the residual traces of smoke. She went up the stairs and cracked open the master bedroom door, only to be hit by a draft from the open window.

Donni looked at the charred spot on the master bedroom’s carpet, radiating outwards like an evil star. One of the legs of the bed had been blackened, the sheets charred on one side. In the middle of the big pile of burnt objects, she could make out the crumbling remains of the chair she had used to defend herself against the dog. When she kicked it with her foot, it broke apart.

“They were going to burn you alive,” she said, in a slightly strangled voice.

“I think I was incidental.” There was a strange bite in his tone that she couldn’t interpret. “They were definitely focused on burning things from my father’s desk. Almost like they knew exactly what you and I had been looking for and wanted to put a stop to it.”

“But we didn’t find anything,” Donni said, though her mind immediately went to the post-its and day planner she had slipped in her purse. Her grip on it tightened.

Rafe missed the gesture. “Maybe they thought you would. Or there’s something we both missed. Though it might be too late now.” He ducked his head, sniffing at his T-shirt. “I smell like someone’s old fireplace. I better head back to the motel.”

“No,” she said, startling herself. “I don’t want to be alone in this house.”

“I’ll need somewhere to sleep.”

Donni decided to ignore that, though his opportunism rattled her. “I’ll make up the guest room again. You can wear some of your father’s old clothes.”

He looked at her for what seemed like a long time. “All right. I’m going to shower then. You can leave the clothes outside the bathroom door.”

She watched him go, not liking the surety of his steps or the way he was bossing her around in her own house.Inviting him in was a mistake, she thought again, but now that he was here, it almost felt like he was a part of the place. She wasn’t sure how to ask him to leave or if she even wanted to, because the thought of being here all alone was so much worse.

What if she hadn’t gone out to the post office? Would the house have been burned to ash with the two of them in it? She thought of that final scene inStarfucker, when Thorn burned the house down and Donovan clawed desperately at the melting glass windows, unable to prize them open. Thorn, meanwhile, had accepted her fate: if they couldn’t be together in life, their ashes could be commingled ever after in death.

Only a man would find that romantic.

Donni startled, looking at her own gray reflection, before shaking herself and pulling open the mirrored closet. Marco had kept a lot of his clothes from his slimmer days in the hopes that he’d shed the added pounds one day. Now, he never would. She pulled down one of the plastic Sterilite tubs and took out some old but clean clothes: boxers, mesh shorts, an old T-shirt. She half-expected them to smell like her husband, but they just smelled stale and slightly old.

The water was already running when she went downstairs and poked her head into the guest room, hating how timid this made her feel. The bathroom door was hanging ajar and she could smell the lime and vetiver scent of the shampoo she had picked out, curling on the steam. Imagining that scent on his skin sent a little ripple of awareness down her spine. She could almost picture herself tasting the rivulets of water trickling down his throat as she helped him soap his impressive chest before he lost all patience and shoved her against the tile, to take her from—

No, she thought, fingers tightening. She dropped the clothes in a heap outside of the door and backed away, nearly panting.

She had spent her whole life setting these boundaries. With Rafe, she was afraid of what would happen if the safety of that barrier was removed.

So many men had fallen for her on-screen personae, only to become personally offended when they discovered she was nothing like those women in real life. She had a whole DM box full of messages from those men: men who expected her to be receptive to their come-ons, or who were angry that she was no longer the twenty-something scream queen who used to get them hard.

Sometimes she wondered if Johnathan had given her those over-sexed roles in an attempt to damage her credibility and sabotage her career. Nobody took a hot mess seriously, even if she wasn’t really a hot mess at all. It was enough to merely look the part because society dictated that a woman was never worth more than the sum of her parts if the parts looked like they wanted to be fucked.

She liked her movies well enough, and was proud of the work that had gone into them, but people often couldn’t look at her the same way after watching them. Because of that, she had begged Marco not to let his son to, but Marco had let Rafe do whatever he wanted and, of course, he had watched them anyway. So perhaps when he looked at her, he was seeing her through that same warped and distorted lens. Not the woman—only the actress.

Donni changed out of her tank top and linen vest, throwing on a Calida sleep set and what she had once privately thought of as her “rich widow” robe—until Marco had died, and it had become exactly that. The feather trimming was ridiculous but the velvet was warm and she no longer had anyone to try and be sensible for. It rippled against the backs of her legs as she walked to the kitchen to try to figure out what to make for dinner when she felt so damn drained.

“So youcancook.”

She nearly tore the door off the fridge. Rafe was leaning against the doorway with his ankles crossed. His father’s old shirt stretched taut over his shoulders and pectorals, defining every rippling movement of the muscle beneath. Under the lights, his wet hair gleamed like black river stones. He looked exactly like what he was in that moment: dangerous.