Emily woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t go back to sleep.
She couldn’t remember ever having an enemy.
But wasn’t that what Destiny now was?
Maybe rival, she thought, was a better word to describe the girl. They were competing for Sam’s affection. Only, the crazy part was that Emily had already won.
He was hers.
Weren’t she and Sam one?
Hadn’t they already been tested?
Since the impossibly sexy Destiny had appeared, suddenly they were one plus the shadow of someone else. And it felt like they were three.
Was she imagining that?
No.
It was real.
When she and Sam were alone together after work, she felt as if the magnetlike pull of emotion that brought them together had been blocked.
Or rearranged.
Some other element had entered the equation. And just because they weren’t talking about it didn’t mean it wasn’t happening.
He was vulnerable. Emily knew that. He didn’t have enough experience living a stable life. He was strong, but at the same time she could feel his weakness. It was real. It might lead him astray. It might ruin his life.
There was morning light in the sky when Emily finally fell back asleep. But the distant pink on the horizon was Destiny’s favorite color.
At least that’s what she had told Emily at the restaurant when she’d applied a smear of gloss over her large, pouty lips.
Before, Emily might have seen the sky as beautiful, but as she dozed back to sleep, her last thought was that the future light looked grim.