Kaleidoscope by Gail Bowen

and angry, but Mieka knows I’d crawl over broken glass to stay close to her and the girls.”
    “She’d never make you do that,” Zack said. He turned the keys in the ignition. “Do you want to skip checking out Leland’s condo and just go straight to the lake?”
    “No. Ed and Barry’s wedding is tomorrow, and Monday Cronus’s trial starts and Taylor’s in school. This is the only chance we’ll have to see what we need to bring with us.”
    “Your call,” Zack said.
    Absorbed by our own thoughts, we fell silent for a while. After Zack turned left and headed for the Warehouse District, I said, “What did you and Riel talk about?”
    Zack shrugged. “Basically, I told him that if he was going to hang around with our daughter and our granddaughters, he should decide what kind of man he wanted to be.”
    “How did he take that?”
    “He said he’d die before he’d let anyone harm Mieka or the girls. I told him if anyone even remotely connected with him laid a finger on any of them, he wouldn’t have to make a decision about dying.”
    “I guess that tore it,” I said.
    Zack made a dismissive gesture. “Nah. My tone was kindly. After that, we just chatted and watched the girls swim.”
    “I think Mieka’s in love with him,” I said. “Really in love. I’ve never seen her this fierce about a man.”
    “Not with the girls’ father? I’ve always assumed that things started out hot there and just cooled down.”
    “No. Mieka and Greg’s relationship was never ‘hot.’ They kind of drifted into marriage, and then the girls came along, and they were both committed to being good parents, so they stuck it out.”
    “And then Mieka had her ‘aha’ moment. She told me about it.”
    “I’m surprised,” I said. “She’s careful not to talk about Greg.”
    “We didn’t exactly talk about Greg. It was after dinner one night at the lake. I was noodling around with an old Peggy Lee song, and Mieka sat down to listen. When the song was finished, she said that for a while, she felt as if that piece of music had been written just for her.”
    “So what was the song?”
    Zack sang the opening bars of “Is That All There Is?”
    For the past twelve hours, the news had been unremittingly grim. Leland’s condo was a glorious surprise. Its structure was the twin of Margot’s, but the ambience here was Tuscan – simple, welcoming, informal. Most of the furniture was wood. The tables were carved and hand painted, the chairs and sofas were upholstered in durable fabrics in the warm colours of late afternoon: cream, terra cotta, honey-gold, burgundy, orange-red.
    The appliances in the kitchen were the newest and best, but the tiles above the counters had the soft patina of age. The centre of the kitchen was a large wooden butcher-block table.“Wow,” Zack said. “This does not look like Leland.”
    “Leland said his decorator came highly recommended,” I said.
    “I can see why,” Zack said. “Do you like it?”
    “Very much,” I said. “It’s what I would do if I knew half as much as Leland’s decorator does.”
    “You know all the things that matter,” Zack said. “Now that we’ve oo’ed and ah’ed, let me see if I can get around this place in my chair.”
    Taylor would have the upstairs master suite to herself, and in addition to the oversized bedroom, she had two bathrooms, a large sitting room, and a second small bedroom. There were two more bedrooms and two bathrooms on the main floor. While Zack checked out the width of the doorways, the turning spaces, and the height of the counters in the kitchen and the bathrooms, I wandered over to the huge windows overlooking the street.
    On the corner of the next block there was a wholesale party supplies store that looked similar to the building we’d planned to turn into UpSideDown2. The first time Mieka had shown me the Markesteyn property, her face had shone with excitement. As I remembered my daughter’s joy on that cold winter morning,