“As well he should be, Nana. Your downward dog is the best,” Shannon said as they both planted their hands on their mats. Shannon had taken up yoga in college when she tore her ACL, hoping it would help rehab her and send her back to the stage. No such luck. ACL injuries were pretty much impossible to come back from. But the practice had helped her to recover, and she’d kept it up since it was one more way to stay active. Her grandmother had taken to yoga quickly too, and now it was something they did together whenever Shannon visited her, which was at least once a week.

Her brothers were in the backyard. Michael, the handiest of the crew, was fixing a fencepost with their grandfather, while Ryan and Colin drank beers and tended to the grill. The homey scene was almost enough to make anyone forget why the six of them were so close.

“I hear from Colin that you’re doing business with your old flame,” Victoria said, as they finished their final stretch. There was no judgment in her tone. No haughty raise of the eyebrow. Victoria was never like that, not now, and not when she’d taken them in when they were teens. She’d done her best to finish the job her son had started, seeing the four of them through the end of their high school years after their mother went to prison for conspiracy to commit murder, sentenced in a swift and speedy trial mere months after the killing of their father.

Shannon’s stomach clenched, as it often did just thinking of the last moments of her father’s life. Thomas Paige was shot four times in the driveway of their own home, a run-down, ramshackle house in North Las Vegas, the worst section of the city, riddled with crime. He’d been found with fatal gunshot wounds and an emptied wallet, as if a robbery had simply gone wrong. A robbery was plausible enough in that neighborhood.

Shannon and her brothers didn’t come from means. They came from desperation. They were bred from broken dreams, from a mother who’d wanted to be a Vegas star but never had the talent, so instead eked out a meager living as a seamstress, and from a father stuck driving cabs in the nightshift. But his situation started to change, and he’d thought he’d finally caught his lucky break when he began driving limos. He started making more money, and after a couple of years at his new gig, the future looked bright.

But there was no lucky break the June night he was shot after eight hours of chauffeuring rich kids from the swank suburbs to their after-prom parties.

Social services sent the pack of unruly Paige-Prince kids to live with their paternal grandparents once their mom was arrested for murder. Shannon hadn’t even started high school then, and at the time she’d never fully comprehended how horrible her grandparents must have felt. Their son was dead, his life taken at the hands of his wife, the very same woman who’d carried these four messed-up, fucked-up, troubled kids who had been dropped on their doorstep as teens—orphaned through death and then through prison bars.

As she grew older, Shannon came to understand the terrible balancing act that her father’s parents had had to pull off to raise them with love and kindness during those last few critical years. Shannon and her three brothers were grafted by murder into their grandparent’s home, united by the death of the flesh and blood that linked the two generations.

Some days, she missed her father fiercely. Today, she felt that empty longing envelop her in a split second as she stepped out of the pose, finishing their yoga session, and looked at a sun-faded photo of her father in his young twenties that hung above the end table on the sun porch. Sepia now in tone, the image showed his hands wrapped around Michael’s waist as he hoisted the toddler onto a slide. She could remember him taking her to the park, too, sometimes with his parents. He’d loved the outdoors, and loved to soak up the sun with his kids.

Her grandparents were the reason she returned to Vegas after a few years working in London, Miami, and Santa Fe for various dance companies and touring shows. Despite all that had happened, Las Vegas was the epicenter of her fractured family, her grandparents the heartbeat. Together with her brothers, they’d moved their grandparents into a new house in a safe and affluent section of Vegas. They’d made a pact as teens to live differently than their parents, to pull themselves out of the shit circumstances they’d grown up in, and to make sure they’d never be like their mother, who’d do anything for money.

Who’d done the worst for money.

Shannon looked at the picture again, pressed her fingers to her lips, and then touched her dad’s photo in the frame. Victoria did the same, and murmured, “Rest in peace.” Shannon’s throat hitched. Even now, even eighteen years later, she still felt so much emotion welling up inside her.

Better to focus on the conversation about Brent than to drift off into photos of days gone by.

“You hear correctly,” Shannon said, answering Victoria’s question about working with her old flame. “He hired my company to arrange for some dancers and choreography at his night clubs.”

They walked across the cool tiled floor to the kitchen. Victoria turned on the tap and poured some water, and handed a glass to Shannon, who downed half of it quickly. “He’s a sweet boy,” Victoria said in a whisper, first checking to see if any of Shannon’s brothers were in earshot.

“Boy,” Shannon said with a laugh. Brent was hardly a boy. He was all man, and the memory of how he’d touched her on his bar the other morning crashed back into her, like a comet of lust.

“He came back to bring me my ring, you know,” Victoria said, leaning her hip against the counter as she pushed a hand through her silvery hair.

Shannon furrowed her brow. “You never told me before.”

“I did try to tell you at the time, sweetheart. But you didn’t want to hear a word of it. You weren’t interested in any news about Brent, so I let it go. The ring doesn’t fit me anymore, but he came by and dropped it off himself shortly after you split.”

A strange sense of shock raced through her system as she flashed back in time. She remembered tossing the ring at Brent the day she’d walked out. She recalled too the red-hot rage, coupled with the soul-ripping sadness that her one true love had chosen something other than her. The days after the break-up were an agonizing blur of tears and investments in boxes of tissues, of anger and impromptu sessions using her couch pillows as punching bags. The weeks that followed were worse, the missing intensifying, the emptiness deepening, and they’d made her wish she had answered his calls earlier because his calls had stopped.

Shannon vacuumed up those memories. She knew her grandmother had the wedding band again, but she’d never stopped to find out how it came back to her. She’d always figured it had arrived by mail, never by personal courier in the form of Brent Nichols.

“He called me in advance. Made sure I was here. Said he wanted to return it to its rightful owner,” Victoria continued, as she poured herself a glass of water.

“He came to see you at your house?” she asked, processing this news for the first time.

“He did. Pulled up on his bike and came inside. I offered him some tea, and sat with him for a few minutes. Russ was at work, so it was just your boy and me. He said he didn’t want to risk putting the ring in the mail, or FedEx, or any of those services,” she said, and this little detail somehow worked its way into Shannon’s heart, chipping away at the tiniest piece of ice that had coated that organ to protect her from Brent.

“That’s actually really thoughtful,” she said softly.

“He asked about you. He wanted to know if you were okay. How you were doing.”

Her heart beat faster. She wanted to grab it and tell it to settle down. “He did?”