"Seraphim are fiery angels," Harris says and Agatha echoes in a sing-song voice: "The wings of fire to whisk you away from harm. A blazing sword to punish evil. A nimbus of flames to see what's true."

"Okay..." That's a weird answer, but he can't think of anything else.

"I was born with a spark and my passions set fires. It was a little like pyrokinesis, only much, much, much more. He would be my guardian angel, but I had to do the work. Had to get better. Had to force the mortals to release me from the clinic before the word burned."

This sounds exactly like a thing to entangle a fourteen year-old struggling with unanswerable questions and too much grief for any child to bear. To free a mind from a net like this... one can't just cut through. He needs to go knot by knot. "Did... did the seraph tell you all this?"

"Yes." Her eyes focus on something beyond Singapore. "It was little more than a whisper in the night at first. Such a beautiful, ethereal voice..."

"And then?"

"Once I was free and clear, I received messages on my phone."

Harris doesn't know what to make out of the whispers, but to him, texts are a spectacularly non-angelic method of communication. Glowing letters on clouds, or something equally awe striking.

"Texting is such a human thing to do," he says softly.

"I'm a human. He was considerate of my limitations."

"Or it could have been a stalker." He even knows the stalker's name. Oliver Appleby.

"Harris!" Her eyes flung open. There's so much in her gaze, his fingers crack behind her back, locked on the verge of breaking. "I'm sorry. I didn't live through what you've lived through."

"I understand your skepticism. At times, I thought... I doubted." She chuckles, dismissing logic as folly. "There were fires whenever I forgot myself and gave into base emotions."

"Sam told me about them."

"Sam doesn't know half of it. Harris, you promised—"

"I did and I believe you. I believe you!" He's rocking back and forth, trying to calm the whirlwind of guesses. Rocking her too, as he would a terrified child. "I'm looking for a way to help. I'm thinking. Give me a moment." Or a lifetime.

"It's so strange. For years, I've talked to people every day on my blogs and streams about every little thing, revealing even passing thoughts. Except for this. This, I could never talk to anyone about... before you."

His finger joints crack again. "You still talk to him, right? To this..." he swallows a cuss. He can't offend the girl trembling in his embrace. One wrong word—and she'll fly away, and then there'll be no hope for either of them. "This angel? You still talk to him?"

She bites her lip and darts a glance at the dark sky. "More than that. We grew closer as I was getting older. Other girls craved boys' company. Kisses at first, then more. I envied the physical manifestations of love they found."

Harris meets her imploring gaze. His cheeks heats up, thinking about Desiree's body twined with his own in bed. "We all want someone to hold us."

She exhales a sigh of relief. "I was afraid it was going to hurt someone if I did it with Sam or any other boy. So, I begged my angel for help. He promised to come to me in the flesh."

"And he did, didn't he?"

"Uh-huh."

"Oliver." Harris squeezes the name through his teeth, like meat through the meat grinder grill. God help any other Oliver he might meet later in life. "Oliver told you, he's the seraph. The angel in the flesh who came to save you from yourself."

"I... I didn't recognize him at once when we were introduced by my aunt. But then he took me aside and he revealed himself. He knew things about me nobody else could have known."

The hotel room is so neat that there's nothing at hand for Harris to throw at the walls. His hands shake so badly, the lock of his fingers comes undone. The headache is baring his nerve endings raw. If he didn't hold her, he'd throw himself bodily against the wall. Pound it with his fists. Anything to open a relief valve... But he's holding her, so he'd drop to hell before he's letting go. He'll broil on the inside if he has to.

"Somehow, he must have found out about your parents and how you struggled with it," Harris says. That's the only rational explanation. "Agatha, please, read through the file I gave you. One thing the private eye emphasized is the meticulous, obsessive planning and patience of the perpetrator who harassed Mrs. Ang's business. He's a true psychopath."

She shifts out of his arms until she stands in front of the window, hands gripping the windowsill. Haze hangs so thick in the air, it seems to push against the glass. "Harris, that's why I went to the clinic two weeks ago. I wanted to know if their records have ever been compromised."

She doubted! In her heart she knew what's what. His heart hitches. "And?"

"The answer was 'no'. All protocols were followed. The records were destroyed upon my release because I was a minor. Then..."

"Then the hotel caught on fire with her left in a room naked, drugged." Which was just the kind of thing to appall her family enough to— "Did your family pressure you into marrying Appleby after that fire?"

She hiccups. "I received a call from my aunt the moment I was released from the hospital. She sounded hysterical. She didn't really pressure me to marry him, but she shamed me for a good while. Then came the carrot: a position on the board if I 'sorted myself out.' They denied it to me previously because I was 'too unwell'."

No wonder she acted traumatized at that gala! Everything was pushing her to the safety of marrying Mr. Right and her childhood home.

Harris has no idea where the remote that controls everything in the room went, so he closes the blinds the old-fashioned way. The view of the sky saps her strength by reminding her of the fires in her life. He wants her to remember that he had carried her out of the burning building.

"But you did go to Miluwakee to ask about the clinic's records. Why? Did anything trigger your suspicions?"

"Because I didn't recognize Oliver when he first entered the room. Because I didn't feel what I thought I would feel at the mere sight of him." Her hand rises to touch his lips.

His heart thuds in his ears, dissolving his headache. He kisses her fingertips. "What did you think you should have felt?"

"This," she whispers, lifting on her tiptoes. "This..."

Is it okay for a gentleman to close his eyes and part his lips if the lady kisses him first? Is it okay to inhale the scent of her skin greedily? Should a gentleman thread his fingers through her hair and pull off a scarf to let her hair unwind down this lady's back? And all the while, all the while could he suckle on her lips and release, but keep his tongue at bay? Let her explore, as if he's never returned a single kiss before this day?

"Did you feel this the moment you saw me?" he breathes in her probing lips.

"Mainly, I thought you were a giant douche, but yes... I also felt this. You?"

He feels heat rising in his cheeks. "I want my lawyer and, maybe, my union rep before I implicate myself."

She giggles and kisses him again. Time disappears.

Finally, he tears himself away from her lips. "Agatha, you shouldn't marry Oliver if you don't feel like this toward him, but feel like this toward me." There, he said it. Said what has to be said.

"Don't you understand?" She takes a step back, hands to the mouth he was just tasting. "Love isn't safe for me. Or for you. You must leave and I must marry Oliver to keep everyone safe."

Harris chews his lip, not sure what to even say to that. How to say it.

"I know how insane it sounds, Harris. But I also know that I'm not crazy."

"Not crazy, Agatha, never crazy. You're suffering and all I want to do when I look at you is to fix it."

"Harris, you can't."

"How can I not want to? I love you."

"You barely know me."

"Time doesn't matter, because I've waited for you my whole life." Who sounded crazy now? But in for a penny, in for a pound... "I love you, Agatha. Come away with me to Milwaukee. Let me protect you."

The silence stretches between them. Her face scrunches in a painful grimace while she's thinking, thinking... Thinking is good, right? Oliver and him, being weighed and measured before her. He must come on top, he has to.

"Harris, tell me one thing," Agatha asks at last. "On the night I left for Singapore, when I was trying to find you, where were you?"

An invisible fist punches him in the gut. He gasps for air, biding his time, as excuses swarm in his mind. 'You were engaged. You were leaving. I felt alone. Disappointed.'

All good excuses, however, he tells the naked, unadorned, bitter truth. "I was with Desiree."

He was with Desiree, going at it like rabbits all night, tiring himself so much he didn't pick his cell phone once. He doesn't need to explain it. Her eyes reflect the full understanding of his night... no, worse. They are filled with the imaginings of what went on in Desiree's bedroom.

"Agatha, listen. I lied," he says weakly, "I lied when I said she was the one. You left me with no choice—"

He cuts himself off at the hurt look on her face. Agatha didn't put him into Desiree's bed. She went on her way, engaged to a man who courted her for months and pretended to be a seraph. It was he, Harris, who parachuted into the first bed he spotted like sex was going out of style.

"I got stupid, okay? I made a mistake. This doesn't mean you can't trust me."

"Actually, it does." Her brow twitches. "Oh, gosh. Now Desiree would be wondering where you've disappeared to."

"Desiree doesn't want to have anything to do with me! She broke it off and... anyway, forget about her!" Once the words are out of his mouth, he realizes that they're not a glowing recommendation on his lover's resume. Oliver could have sowed wild oats all around the globe, but he'd never given Agatha one reason to doubt that he'd only ever wanted her. On the opposite, he had that obsessed look about him.

"Come with me to Milwaukee," Harris pleads, rubbing his forehead. "We'll take it slow. Learn things about one-another, go on dates and stuff. Normal stuff. And let the police do their job in the meantime. Please?"

She glances at the window. Even though the blinds are opaque, Harris senses that she can see the haze in her mind's eyes.

"No," she decides at last. "No. Go home, Harris. Patch things with Desiree—"

He swallows hard in protest.

"Desiree or someone else. Some lucky woman... and be safe." She wails the last words, presses her hands to her mouth and dashes out of his room.

Harris lunges after her, but before he makes an even bigger ass out of himself, he stops dead in his tracks. One stalker is enough for any one woman to handle. She doesn't need another love-sick man chasing her around Singapore.

"I don't want Desiree," he whispers to the empty room. His bed is made with geometrical precision. He drops on the silk cover with stitched branches and drops his face into his hands. Happiness was within his grasp. Agatha was kissing him. He held her. But he blinked—and she was gone. He traded in happiness for a night of lust, even though he knew darn well it wasn't the same, not nearly the same, couldn't be nowhere close to the same. Because he ignored happiness for so long, he forgot not only what it was like to be happy, but he stopped wanting to be happy. The fault was all his.

His Dad kept telling him that and he argued like a dumbass. He kept running in small circles fixing useless shit. But the stuff that actually needed fixing? He left it broken to pieces. And because of this, Agatha won't let him help her.

'You have time yet,' Mrs. Ang told him. Indeed, he has nothing but time ahead of his flight home. It won't help his epic fail with Agatha, but he digs his phone out. It's slow in coming, stuck in the back pocket of his khaki shorts. When it's in his lap at last, he hunches over it, one hand clutching his own hair. Awkwardly, he punches a number he's looked up after talking to Mrs. Ang. The phone rings, then drops to the voice-mail.

'You've reached Shushan Sarkisian. I'll be out of the office and not monitoring my calls or emails until Monday—' a robotic version of his mother's voice informs him.

Harris hangs up instead of leaving a message. Why? He has time. The word he hasn't addressed to anyone in a while will remain unsaid. Does it have to be? He lifts his head and says it tentatively, "Mom."

The sound is no longer than a fraction of a second and absorbed by the curtains and the cushions, but it opens a flood gate inside him. He lets go of his hair and dials the airline.

Let them keep him on hold for the rest of the day. Let them take everything he has in his bank account. He has to fly to Milwaukee tonight. Has to see Dad. Walk into their house. Yeah, it's a fixer-upper. Yeah, it's nowhere near pretty enough next to this out-of-this-world hotel. But he has to go home tonight. Only there he'll be able to sleep, wake up and regroup. Only there. Nobody has ever missed Milwaukee more.