In a smaller voice, one that sounded like the little girl who only wanted her daddy to be sober or to stop locking himself in his room at night and crying over Eva, Dawn asked, “You really believe we’ll find him?”
With no hesitation, Breisi nodded. “Even if I don’t seem sure, I always believe it, deep down. I keep thinking that God would not have made me feel the way I do about Frank if I wasn’t meant to play a more important part in his life.”
A more important part. Oddly enough, Dawn didn’t chafe at that. She imagined Breisi might’ve made aimless Frank pretty happy, balanced him out so he could function better. And, evidently, that’s exactly what had happened in the time before he’d gone missing. He hadn’t been Frank the screwup anymore; he’d held down a job, paid his bills. Unbelievable.
From the back, Kiko breathed deeply, so relaxed that he was snoozing. It gave Dawn some courage to finally go where she never thought she wanted to before.
“Were you the one helping him get his act together, Breez?”
The other woman hesitated, then shrugged. “I suppose. But it was his choice to begin the process.”
“Maybe you were the reason he did it.” She couldn’t believe she’d admitted that, but it felt decent, as if she’d finally caught on to something else she’d packed away inside of herself. Something she hadn’t dared open for fear of how much it’d destroy her.
Breisi seemed to savvy how hard this was for Dawn. She flashed an easy smile. “You’d be happy to know that he was even starting to drink less. I made him smoothies, hoping that would fulfill some sort of craving, and he gulped them down without complaint. Blueberry.” She laughed softly. “That is his favorite.”
A lump tightened Dawn’s throat. “Is. Is his favorite.”
“Yes, is.”
As another stoplight halted them, loud rap music from the Buick next door thudded through the floorboards. They took off at the green signal, leaving the clamor behind.
“Did you guys…?” Dawn stopped. Then started. “Did you ever talk about marriage?”
“We talked, yes.”
Something snapped inside, a final link Dawn had been maintaining, one that joined Eva and Frank in all their romantic, whirlwind-marriage snapshots.
“But,” Breisi added, “we had that big fight about Eva. I thought he still wasn’t letting go enough and he disagreed.” She bit her lip, then pressed both of them together before speaking again. “Now that I look back, he was right. I’m the one who wasn’t letting go of her.”
“I know what you mean.”
Because she, herself, was holding on to Eva through Jac now, and it was time to claw herself out of this hole of bitterness and one-sided competition between a goddess mother and her mortal daughter. Time to just leave the hard feelings behind.
But…panic fluttered at the thought of deserting such a vital part of her existence. What would she be without Eva?
Rather than face down that question, Dawn relaxed, dealing with more immediate menaces instead. The menaces she was getting to know real well.
“It must’ve been crazy, dating a fellow investigator.” She played with the label of the water bottle, tearing at it. “I mean, it’s bad enough tapping a regular coworker, but at least in normal life you don’t have to worry about your boyfriend fighting monsters for his paycheck.”
“Not the best of circumstances, I agree.”
“But it’s natural, I think, to gravitate toward someone you spend so much time with. It happens on every nine-to-five job, and especially movie sets. Damn, if we could keep a tally of how many costars fall into bed, the numbers’d populate a small country.”
“It might be even more natural with someone in our business.”
Our business. Could that possibly include Matt Lonigan? And what about The Voice? Did that mean it was perfectly natural to be hitting that?
Dawn turned her entire body toward Breisi now. “More natural?”
“Yes.” Breisi smiled, but it wasn’t a happy gesture. “Who else could I ever date, assuming that I’d want to? What would I say to a regular man I just met in, for instance, the hardware store? ‘Hi, I’m Breisi. I like building my own computers, taking long walks on the beach, and killing vampires.’”
Laughing at the other woman’s candor, Dawn took up where Breisi had left off. “Because I did terminate a vamp last night, you know. One with red eyes and iron fangs—”
“And burning spit—”
Laughing even louder at how ridiculous it sounded, Dawn embellished. “And a belly button that can suck you inside and put you right in the middle of a tea party with Bigfoot.”
Breisi laughed, too. It was nice to see. She didn’t go there much at all.