Free Delusion Road by Don Aker

The girl was nothing to him. She could date whoever she wanted, right?
    But that twinge was there just the same. Gnawing at him.
    Griff studied the photo that Talia had posted with her status update. In it, she and this Nick guy were standing in front of the Chicago Culture Center. He had his arm around her waist, and she was gazing up at him instead of at the camera. She looked happy.
    There had been a long period when that hadn’t been the case. Griff wasn’t completely insensitive—he knew it must have been hard on her after her boyfriend disappeared. And before that, there were the two days it took the medical examiner to confirm that what little remained of the body found in the rubble was female. At least then Talia knew he was still alive. But all those unanswered questions must have weighed on her.
    Much to Griff’s dismay, arson was suspected and later confirmed, but that was only because the husband had disappeared,a fact that raised a huge flag for investigators. They’d initially found no trace of an incendiary device, but when they combed through the debris a second time, one eager forensic specialist discovered minute evidence of the mechanism’s signature. And once that detail was released, there was no end of speculation in the media about what had happened. At first, reporters focused on the possibility of insurance fraud, only to discover later that there was no policy on the wife. No policy on any of them, in fact, since their insurance had lapsed a year earlier. Then there was the suspicion the wife had been having an affair and the husband killed her after finding out, but no neighbours or co-workers could corroborate that theory. There were other stories, too, but of all those generated by the explosion and subsequent disappearance of the husband and two boys, Griff had most enjoyed the terrorist angle: the family had lost everything in a foreclosure and the husband had been planning to blow up the bank that had taken his house, but the device he’d built had detonated accidentally. And since there was no evidence to suggest otherwise—the guy’s money problems were, after all, well documented—that one had been bandied about by the media for days until another news cycle had kicked in. Things might have gone differently if the target had had relatives around to defend him and demand answers, but there was no one.
    What had pleased Griff about all those stories was that nothing tied the explosion to anyone else, which was probably another reason why he was still among the living. The target had, after all, worked for Battaglia, so there was no direct connection between him and that pasty-faced fuck Morozov. But despite the satisfaction Griff took from how things had turned out, hecould appreciate how hard all of those stories must have been on the girl. Which only increased the respect he’d felt for her as she’d continued to wait month after month for news of her boyfriend. There was no denying how attractive she was, and there was probably no end of guys waiting to take his place.
    Griff studied that photo once more, looked at the expression on Talia’s face, looked at the way this Nick person had wrapped his arm around her, and he felt that twinge again.

CHAPTER 14
    G uiding the SUV into the three-car garage attached to her family’s Georgian colonial, Willa replayed in her head the conversation with the new guy one more time:
About this morning, what I said when I introduced you, I wanted to
—It sounded like he’d been about to apologize, but then Britney had jumped in and the whole thing had gone to hell.
You need to grow up, Jaffrey
, he’d said. As if he
knew
her! But as much as that had stung, it was his parting remark—
I had you pegged from the moment we met. What you see is what you get, right?
—that had made her lose her temper.
    Getting out, she crossed the other two garage bays. Her father’s was empty, but a new Cadillac ATS with dealer plates—
Jaffrey 2
—sat in