I nodded back less resolutely. My heart began to ache for the man who was always by my side, always cheering me on. I wanted to do more. I wanted to help. I wanted to save him. But with no access to his client files, with no knowledge of the evidence against him, there wasn’t much I could do but wait.

“Can I get you a drink?” Julie asked Oliver.

He smiled. “I can’t think why not.”

I almost laughed out loud. She had just asked for a man to fall into her lap. Now if only a huge piece of evidence would fall into mine.

Alice Bad Juju

Sometimes I wondered what would have happened with my husbands had they not died. If Glen hadn’t been killed in a car crash on the way to his knee surgery pre-op, would we be watching a movie with our kids and dog right now? If Walter hadn’t fallen off that ladder, would we be on the beach hunting for shells? Would we be happy? Sometimes, listening to the stories of my fellow mommune members, I wasn’t so sure. With all the lying and cheating and deception that went on, would any of my loves have lasted?

Maybe it was naïve, but I always came back to Jeremy. I always believed that we would have been the ones to make it forever; we would have been the ones to fight through the hardest times and make it to the other side. But I never had the chance to find out. And that was what I couldn’t move past. Or maybe I didn’t want to move past it. Was that why I stayed here in this house, pouring salt in the wound?

The first time Jeremy ever brought me to Juniper Shores, twenty-five years ago, we had walked by this house that has been mine for years now. “Babe, one day you and I are going to live in this house,” he said. “It’s going to be all ours.”

I knew that was why I had convinced Walter to buy it, pooling his resources with the insurance money I had saved from Jeremy. Sure, it was a ridiculously large home for two people. But as a bed-and-breakfast, it was perfect. We had our own private suite upstairs, on the front of the house, and the rest was set up ideally for couples or families looking for a beach getaway. I had told Walter it was my dream to run a bed-and-breakfast. But that wasn’t wholly true. It had been my dream to live in this house with Jeremy. It was as if, by buying it finally, I had made good on our promise; I had carried out our dream.

Only now, as I drove alone through town, I realized that one person couldn’t make another’s dreams come true. Not completely, anyway. And certainly not when the other person was dead.