The sauce starts to bubble, and I pour the hot spaghetti and meatballs right back into the bowl, grab a fork, and plant my ass on the couch. There's nothing on but news channels, which I don't need right now, and cartoons.

Cartoons it is. Cartoons, leftover spaghetti, and beer for breakfast.

This is the high life.

Why is there a squirrel wearing a diving helmet at the bottom of the ocean?

I hear the distinctive rumble of Quentin's car, sigh, and put the half-eaten spaghetti bowl on the coffee table. He pulls out of the driveway and glides down the street in front of me. I turn my head to watch him go and sob, shaking as remorse clutches hard in my chest. Is this it? Is he gone now?

I shake my head and drop back into the couch. The spaghetti doesn't feel so appealing anymore but I slowly eat it anyway, cutting the meatballs with my fork. I eat the whole damned bowl, put it in the sink, and come to the couch with a double helping of cheesecake covered in cherries. Sweeter than sweet, they pop in my mouth and melt into the velvety cream cheese.

By the time I'm done, I can hardly move. My head flops back against the couch and I start to doze off again, staring at the ceiling.

I sleep lightly for the next few hours, snapping awake every now and then. I keep feeling like I'm forgetting something, but it's just nerves. I'm used to being at work or hovering over my kids twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I don't remember how to relax anymore.

When I finally wake up after some weird dreams influenced by overeating and the cartoons droning in the background, it's almost time to go get the kids. I yawn and look down at myself. I'm in my pajamas and there's spaghetti sauce on my chest. I wipe it up with a napkin but it leaves a stain anyway.

Fuck it.

Yawning, I put on my sneakers, grab my keys and start plodding down to the bus stop. Great, now I feel fat.

I can't help but look over my shoulder. Quentin's car is in the garage. He hasn't left yet.

He could still change his mind. I should go...

Go what, crawling on all fours, begging for him? No. I'm not going to let some man wrap me around his finger ever again. Never ever. I did that before and look where it got me. The only thing I have in my life is my girls.

My girls.

I wait at the bus stop with the other moms. It's weird how many of my neighbors don't work. Half of them are in sweatpants and the other half are dressed up from whatever part-time job their husbands pat them on the ass and send them off to during the day. Selling houses or whatever.

The kids file off the busses (the neighborhood has enough kids to require two) and I wait.

I wait, and I wait.

All the kids pile off. The doors slap closed, and the busses' diesel engines snort as they roll off, rumbling, and my kids aren't there. Karen and Kelly aren't there.

Panic reaches up from somewhere deep and squeezes my heart.

I'll call Karen. I pat my pockets. No phone. I left my fucking phone at home.

Turning back to the neighborhood, I bolt, running full tilt, ignoring the burn in my legs and lungs. I run all the way back to the house and stop, almost falling when I spot Russel's Jeep in my driveway.

I can't muster the energy to run. It feels like I'm swimming up to the house. The door is open.

Russel is in my fucking house, and so is his slut. Her name is Skyler. She's twelve years younger than I am. When she started riding Russel's dick she was barely older than Karen is now, a freshman just like I was, although this time he learned his lesson and plucked a flower that wasn't in his classes.

I hate the sight of her. Tall and willowy, she has a model's proportions, a pretty heart-shaped face with rosebud lips and high cheekbones, and a haughty look. Her hair is bleached blonde and she's either wearing a padded bra or she's gotten implants since the last time I saw her. She's in my house, making sandwiches in my kitchen.

"Oh, hi," she says, "The kids were hungry."

Kelly doesn't care. She'll eat anything anybody puts in front of her. If looks could kill, Karen would burn a ragged, hot hole through Skyler's forehead. She accepts the peanut butter and jelly sandwich in sullen silence and takes one bite before slapping it contemptuously on the saucer and folding her arms.

Russel stands in the living room, staring at the television.

"Hello, Rose."

"What do you want? Why are you in my house?"

"It's my house," he says blithely.

"Then you should pay the mortgage."

"I'm up to date on all my payments." He gives the tomato sauce stain on my chest a contemptuous look. "I see you're keeping yourself up."

"I had a day off from work. I don't get many of those. I have to work myself to the bone taking care of my kids and paying the mortgage on this monstrosity."

"That's a shame."

Russel doesn't look much different from the first time he connived me into his bed. He's got a little more gray-when I first fell for him he had those little wings along his ears and exuded that "older man" charm that dumb girls like me fall for so easily. God, I'm such a cliche. If I'm not falling into the arms of an older man I'm getting used as a fuck toy by an obnoxious bad boy.

"What do you want?" I ask again. I fold my arms over my chest, careful to avoid the stain on my shirt.

"I picked the kids up from school. I can do that. I'm their father."

"You get one weekend a month, and this isn't it."

"For now," he says. "I'll be in touch, Rose. I don't think this is a good living environment for my children. I understand you have them unsupervised for long periods of time."

"I've got nothing to say to you, Russel. Leave."

"Well, alright, then. Come on, honey."

Skyler flounces out of the kitchen and glues herself to his side. He makes sure to grope her in front of me, never mind that it's in full view of my daughters. They head out the door and I slam it shut behind them, turn the deadbolt, and sink to the floor.

Silence reigns in the house, except for the sound of chewing. Kelly finished her sandwich and is now eating Karen's for her.

"She has fake boobs," Karen announces.

"Karen," I drawl, trying to sound mad at her for saying that, but I can't muster the energy to pull it off.

Kelly giggles through a mouthful of peanut butter and jelly.

"What did he say while he was driving you here?"

Karen shrugs. "He just asked us about our day, and wanted to know how your job was going and about your classes. I didn't tell him anything. He wants to take us away and make us live with that bitch Skyler."

"Karen!"

"She is a bitch," Kelly agrees.

I sigh. "Stop saying that."

"It's true."

"I know it's true, just don't say it."

Karen gets up, walks over to the door, and plops down next to me. A minute later Kelly joins us, carrying a bowl of cheese doodles.

How does she eat all that?

The hell with it. I take one, crunch it between my teeth, and sigh.

"Block party tomorrow," Karen says, a hint of hope in her voice.

Oh, lovely.

Quentin.

I pace around my basement, trying not to rip the shelves off the walls and kick toolboxes across the room. I want to tear it all down with my bare hands.

Never in my life have I cared about things like this. To me a woman was a lay; no girl ever held my attention after I came. I'm used to being gone the next morning, anyway. There's always another job, another contract, someplace to go, something to do.

Now I'm staring down the barrel of a life-if I even have a chance to live it-without purpose. It's been that way ever since the last contract but now it's in sharp focus. What am I? What am I doing?

"What did you think you were going to do, Quentin? Play house?"

Pacing around the room, I have to think, yeah, exactly that. I never thought about kids before-if you'd asked me a few weeks ago I'd have considered the entire idea absurd. How could I even think about having children? The longest stretch I've ever spent in one place can't have been more than a month or two.

Yet here I am, thinking about the future.

"You have no future," I tell myself.

No man hunted by Santiago de la Rosa has a future. The Knight of Tears never misses his mark, never fails his mission. He will make my end torturous and brutal.

The worst part?

I deserve it.

I don't belong here, in this place. Stranger in a strange land, that's me. I feel dirty, tainted, for the first time ever. It's Rose, and her family, and this life I see around me. Worrying about where cars are parked, what's for dinner, when to mow the grass. It's like an entirely different planet.

I didn't know how dirty I was until Rose showed me what it was like to be clean.

When I look at my hands all I can see is the blood. How many people died at my hand? How much suffering have I inflicted? It's easy to shift the blame. If I didn't take those contracts, someone else would have.

Santiago taught me that death is an art, killing is a vocation. Poisons, sniping, hand-to-hand, knife play, I learned it all at the hands of an expert sadist. I made it quick whenever I could, but when you owe the wrong people money or snitch or do something that justifies suffering in the eyes of the criminal fraternity, the contract calls for more than death.

How many times did I deliver that? Is that all I am? An instrument of misery? An extension of evil people, to be used for evil ends?

It's not like it matters. You bathe in blood for years, it soaks down to your bones. You're not getting out of it. There is no cleaning it off, or cleaning it out. It doesn't matter what I do with my body, my soul is dirty, soiled to the core.

Up until a few days ago I didn't care.

You never forget your first. I was sixteen years old. Santiago raised me from when I was twelve. My parents died. I don't know the details, only that they were murdered. That information was kept from me.

I know there's a reason and the knowing gnaws at me, like a bird pecking my liver.

I never learned the man's name, what he did, or why someone would pay enough to end his life that Santiago de la Rosa would take the contract. To me he was a pudgy middle-aged man in a chair with a bag on his head.

Santiago stood behind him, watching me. I couldn't even see his eyes-his mask covers them with a pair of reflective lenses. He always wore a plain black mask that tucked down under the crisp collar of his dress shirt. I never saw him in less than the finest suits and formalwear, always immaculately clean and pressed so the creases had edges as sharp as the knives he kept in a padded leather case.

Santiago held out a suppressed pistol in his gloved hand, and I took it.

"Shoot him," he said. He has an accent but no one can place it. It might be a blend of accents from other languages, places he's been or trained. It might be to throw people off.

My palms sweated against the wooden grips, the checkering digging into my palm as I tightened my fingers around it. I snapped the safety off and slowly slipped my finger inside the trigger guard, as gingerly as if I'd never done it before. The trigger had three grooves on it.

"What did he do?"

"It doesn't matter. The contract was offered, an advance was paid. If you don't pull the trigger, I will."

I aimed, and pulled it.

It wasn't clean. I flinched. Santiago took the gun from my hand and fired twice more, and did it properly.

"What now?"

"Now we're going to get rid of the body."

My eyes snap open and I jerk to my feet, scrubbing at my face. I haven't slept since I talked to Rose last night. The buzz is gone but I can still feel the bottle of Jack sloshing around in my guts, trying to burn its way out. Fuck it, I need pancakes or something.

There was only one person back then who could give me any comfort. I ran to her right away. Santiago knew it, the son of a bitch, and he used it later.

I lurch into the car and pull out. As I drive by the house I imagine the curtains fluttering, picture her standing there watching me pass. She probably hates me now, and with good reason.

You are such an asshole, Quentin Mulqueen.

I should be obeying all traffic control devices and driving five under the speed limit. The last thing I need is some local cop pulling me over and putting a blip in the system. That'll bring Santiago down on me like ringing a bell. I should leave everything, even the car-go now, just put as much distance between myself and these people as I can.

Rose and her kids deserve more than they have but they also deserve better than me. I'm not doing them any favors lingering here. If I'm already being watched, they'll know about her.

Fuck. "Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!"

I slam my hand on the steering wheel.

Oh, hey, it's the pancake place.

I wheel into the parking lot, walk inside past the Please Wait to be Seated sign, and flop down in a booth. A scowling waitress comes over and stands over me.