She started to snap, then let out a long breath. “You’ve cornered me. No, I’m human, and flawed, and I’m afraid. Accepting my own … shadows seems the most difficult of all.”

“Do you want to go on?”

“Yes.” She reached for the door handle. “Yes, I want to go on.” Stepping from the car, she looked around and wished she knew where to begin. Perhaps she already had. “Have you come out here before?”

“No.”

“Good, then it’s like the first time for both of us.” She shielded her eyes, looking. “It’s so quiet. I wonder if I planned to have the fields planted one day.”

“You talked of it.”

“But did nothing about it.” She began to walk.

Wildflowers grew as they pleased, in the field, along the path. Some were yellow, others blue. Fat, businesslike bees hummed around them. She saw a butterfly as big as the palm of her hand land and balance on a petal. The air smelled of grass, rich grass, rich dirt. She walked on without purpose.

A jay swooped by, annoyed by the intrusion. It flew off, complaining, into the trees. No fairy tale here, she mused. It would be hard, hard work to clear, to plant, to harvest. Is that why it remained undone? Had she only been dreaming again?

“Why did I buy this?”

“You wanted a place of your own. You needed a place where you could get away.”

“Escape again?”

“Solitude,” he corrected. “There’s a difference.”

“But it needs a house.” Suddenly impatient, she turned in a circle. “It needs to live. Look there—if some of those trees were cleared, a house could snuggle in and look out over the fields. There’d be stables there. Yes, and a pasture. A hen house, too.” Caught up, she walked farther, quickly. “Right along here. A farm has to have fresh eggs. There should be dogs and children, don’t you see? It’s nothing without them. Daisies in a windowbox. Laughter through the doorways. The land shouldn’t sit unloved this way.”

He could see it as she did. After all, he’d seen his own land in precisely the same way. Yet they remained worlds apart. “From what I’ve been told, it isn’t unloved.”

“But untended. Nothing alive can go untended.”

Annoyed with herself, she turned to walk farther in the high grass. As she did, her foot hit something and set it rattling against rock. Reeve bent down and picked up a red thermos, empty, with the stopper and top missing. His instincts began to hum. He held it by the base, touching no more than was necessary. He’d been a cop too long.

“In your dreams you’re sitting someplace quiet, drinking coffee from a red thermos.”

Brie stared at it as though it were something vile. “Yes.”

“And you were sleepy.” Casually he sniffed at the opening, but his mind was already working ahead. Just how sophisticated was the police lab in Cordina? he wondered. And why hadn’t the farm been thoroughly investigated? Why had a piece of evidence so potentially important been left unheeded? He was damn well going to find out.