Chapter 3 The actual day I took possession of the house turned out to be the twentieth of October, and on the twenty-first I actually entered our new house for the first time after having seen it in September with the Realtor. Mace wouldn’t be able to come up for a visit until close to Thanksgiving as he was working on a pretty big murder case, but we had laptops and cell phones and face-to-face video chats. They would have to do. We’d faced length separations before. I’d met Mace when we were both kids, then for a time—in middle school, actually—Mace’s family had moved away from the area. It had been devastating for both of us, but I think most especially for me. I’d had a big crush on Mace then, though, at the time we were only friends. Mace didn’t come back into my life until his fa