“Please,” Annie replied. “Please do. And thank you. You saved my sanity. And maybe my life.”

“My pleasure,” Donna said. “Now go back to the Inn. And sleep.”

After Donna closed the bedroom door, Annie didn’t feel like drinking tea. She started to carry the mug over to the sink when, halfway across the room, she noticed a small white paper on the floor inside the door. She moved closer to it and stopped. Then she picked it up. It was a business card: MARK LEWISTON, COMMERCIAL PROPERTY CONSULTANT. His phone number was on the bottom.

Before Annie could freeze again, she finished walking to the sink, then flung the card into the trash.

* * *

She’d done as she’d been told and gone back to the Inn. She’d been unafraid to meet Mark in the dark, on the lawn, because she’d suspected he was long gone. Still, Annie couldn’t sleep. She’d called Kevin, told him what had happened, and then asked if he’d come over and crash on the sofa in the cottage—just in case. Mark wouldn’t know that Annie wasn’t still there, and she didn’t want to risk that he’d barge in on Donna. Though Annie knew she could have gone back, she felt Donna would be safer with Kevin there. And there wasn’t enough space for the three of them.

More than anything, Annie wanted to call Larry Hendricks and blast him. She’d trusted that he wouldn’t have told Mark that they’d talked. Or where she was. Why had she been such a fool?

“Don’t answer that,” she said aloud, in case Murphy was listening.

Then Annie thought about Donna. Wow. That had been some performance, the mama bear defending her cub. Annie would not have believed that Donna could be so . . . tough. Was that the word? Donna had had no idea who the intruder was.... She’d only known that Annie felt threatened. Annie thought about her mother—her other mother—Ellen Sutton. Ellen probably would have stood behind Annie, not in front of her, and there was no way she’d have had a gun. The poor woman had been afraid of most things.

“Duck!” Annie remembered her dad shouting one night when a bat had flown into the house. He had a broom in one hand, a bucket in the other. His command hadn’t been to her, but to her mother who was in the corner, cowering, trembling, crying. Annie had been at the opposite end of the living room, a broom and bucket in her hands, too.

“Come on, kiddo, let’s get this bugger!” He’d always called her kiddo when they were on a mission together, whether they were going to go out for ice cream or swatting bats out of the house. “Damn pine trees!” he said with every swat. “One of these days, we’ll chop ’em down.” They never did, of course. The bats lived in them, and her dad had secretly told her that every critter needed to live somewhere.