Excerpt from Housebreaking by Colleen Hubbard, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

After leaving the cleaning agency with her check, she took a subway home. The car slipped underground into a dark tunnel. When it arrived at her station, a billboard advertising vacations in Mauritius distracted her. Where was Mauritius? How long did it take to fly there? What language did they speak? The cost of the flight was double what she had in her savings account. When she came out of the station, the sun was shining, and she forgot all about it.

"Home early," Tym said as she walked into the kitchen. Tym had buzzed gray hair and ropy calf muscles from riding a bike six days a week to his job at the drugstore. Del had never seen him wear pants; he said that he didn't feel the cold and that shorts were therefore the only appropriate year-round wardrobe item.

He had been one of Del's father's closest friends, along with Dave and Bruce the Moose. Her father and Bruce were dead now, and Dave had moved out west, so it was just the two of them, Del and Tym, holding down the fort.

It was sauce day. Tomato dotted the kitchen wall as well as the apron he was wearing, which had a life-size image of Michelangelo's David with a neck that ended at the top of the apron.

"I guess," she said, with, she hoped, an air of nonchalance. "Everyone's going on vacation next week and not getting their houses cleaned. I've only got a couple of my usuals."

"Weird timing, September. I would have thought people would take vacation in August, before school starts."

Del sat at the table, on a retro red chair that Tym had picked up off the sidewalk. "If you're really, really rich, those kinds of rules don't apply to you. Some of those kids probably don't even go to school. They probably have governesses, or whatever."

Tym dipped a wooden spoon into a pot of bubbling sauce on the range and tasted it. "Makes sense, I suppose."

He made a huge pot of pasta once a week and packed it into individual Tupperware containers to bring to his job where he worked as a photo processor. He didn't use a recipe and the ingredients never changed, yet he was always convinced that the previous week's sauce was better than the current version.

He offered the spoon to Del. "Taste this. Too much salt?"

She fanned the spoon, but even so the boiling sauce singed her tongue. "No."

"Too much meat?"

"Never. It's great."

"There's something," he said, turning worriedly back to the stove. "Something not quite exactly one hundred percent right."

He hummed as he stirred more oil into the pot. "Too much onion, maybe?" he mumbled to himself.

The phone on the wall rang. It was never for Del, so she didn't bother.

"Yellow?" Tym said into the mouthpiece.

He listened to the caller on the other end explain something. Maybe it was a sales call.

"She sure is." Tym held out the phone.

Was it the cleaning agency? The woman who owned the house? Feeling her color rise, Del took the phone. How was she going to cover this?

"Hi?" she said tentatively.

"Adela? Is that you?"

She didn't go by that name anymore. The voice was a man's and had the forceful positivity of a sales pitch.

"Who's this?"

"I thought it was you. Funny. You sound just like yourself. It's Greg. Cousin Greg. You'd never believe how long it took to find your number. If you were trying to hide, you couldn't have done it better." He chuckled as if he had said something particularly funny.

Greg was the youngest of the Murrow brothers. She hadn't seen him since her mother's funeral seven years earlier, when she was a senior in high school. Greg's father, Chuck, was her mother's brother. Del hated Chuck. She hated Greg a little bit less.

She didn't say anything, so Greg continued, like idiots always do. "Well, it's good to talk to you. It's been such a long time! I was just saying-seeing as I'm coming into the city-that it would be good to meet up. You know, catch up. I can't wait to hear what you're doing. Big-city stuff. I've got some business on Friday; d'you think we could meet then?"

Excerpted from Housebreaking by Colleen Hubbard. Copyright © 2022 by Colleen Hubbard. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.