I felt that last question like a knife in my already wounded heart. “If the sheriff found her, Teo, do you know what an arrest would do to my parents? To Bryce’s career? To Holly and Noelle?”

“On the other hand the truth might be the best way to protect the people you love. One blow now, but not a fatal one. Bryce knows who Wendy is, maybe not every lurid detail, but enough that he wanted her out of his life. Your mother has come to terms with what you’ve told her so far, and your father must suspect more is going on than he’s been told. And the girls?”

I hadn’t told Teo about Holly’s nightmare or the revelations afterward. If Wendy was convicted of murder and imprisoned, the girls would have closure of a sort. If she remained at large, she would be a shadow over their lives. They would always wonder why she had abandoned them. They would always wonder if she might show up again.

I had questions, but no answers. “Is my decision going to affect us?”

Teo considered, and I respected him more for not answering immediately.

“She’s your family,” he said after a long moment. “I don’t know what I would do if she were mine, so how can I fault you? But the fate of a murderer should be up to God and the law, nobody else. And those who love the victim or the murderer? They’re least likely to make the right choices.”

“The law’s not always right. Nothing is black or white.”

“You’re trying to be judge, jury, sister and daughter. You can’t be. You shouldn’t be.”

Teo rose to clear the table, but I put my hand on his arm. “Thank you. I listened.”

He leaned over and kissed me. “Do what you need to.”

On the trip home I considered swinging by my parents’ house, but I wasn’t up to telling my mother what I’d learned. I wished I could bask in the warm glow of my night with Teo, and in our budding respect for each other’s differences. But even though I’d left Wendy with the impression I’d said goodbye forever, I still had doubts.

At the town house I took care of mail—just mine now. Wendy’s mail would probably pile up at the Pronghorn post office indefinitely. Afterward I checked the phone and discovered the line was dead. Wendy had finally gotten around to canceling the phone service.

Without Holly and Noelle or Bismarck, the house seemed starkly empty. The refrigerator was almost empty, too, and I made a mental note to buy groceries before I picked up the girls that evening.

At some point I had to call Sophie and report what I’d learned, but at the moment I wasn’t ready to face another explanation. Upstairs I lay down to nap on the same bed where Wendy had slept. Instead I stared at the ceiling.

When had my sister turned into a monster? My mother thought the change had begun after Greta’s death. As terrible as that must have been, how had the drowning transformed her from the perfect daughter, student, friend into someone who, in the most positive scenario, had pulled a gun on a former lover as retaliation for abandoning her?