Think about the family, Daniel —” “Call one now!” And for the first time since Daniel had known her, Vanessa Hart looked genuinely, deeply frightened — not the performed distress of a woman worried about scandal, but the real fear of a person whose careful plan has begun, in front of her, to come apart.

Daniel noticed the fear.

He filed it away, with the wine and the dragging and the single whispered word he did not yet understand. Noah. He did not know who Noah was.

But he had just watched the name change his fiancee’s entire face, and he intended to find out why.

Chapter 5 — Who Is Noah

Daniel rode with Maria to a hospital in West Hollywood, and stayed in the waiting room, still in his robe, turning the name over in his mind. Noah.

She knows about Noah. He could make nothing of it.