She could see it: Earl Bishop has an affair with Monroe Bell. Monroe gets pregnant, and Earl loses it, kills her. Stages a suicide pact to cover it up. That part was easy. Suicide was rampant in these parts. Years later, a reporter shows up and starts snooping around. With Earl’s dementia, it would just take one wrong word to bring down the man who had been one of the town’s most respected leaders. And for what? An outsider? Because that’s what Monroe Bell had been. Cash takes care of the reporter. Jimmy Roarke is scared because Earl called him out that night to help cover up the crime. Lacey’s scared because Cash has been acting off for however long the reporter has been in town and it’s raising red flags for her. Cash was the intruder who shot Izzy, but it had been an attempt to keep them from finding out about Earl’s interview more than an actual attack. It had been a flesh wound, a distraction while he slipped out into the night. Earl kills himself over the guilt of it all, which breaks Cash. He figures let Mia find what she will, let the chips fall and all that.

Like that children’s game: all the dots were there; they just needed to put pen to paper to draw the final image. She could probably even build a somewhat solid case, depending on what she found tomorrow in the Bishops’ house.

She caught the inside of her lip between her incisors and thought back to that photo hanging on the wall just outside the den where she and Izzy were standing—Mia’s face tipped up to Cash, like he owned her universe. She thought about the press of his thumb against her wrist on the pier. The warmth of his long body, the way his arms had gripped her like they’d missed her.

Too close. She was too close to this all. It wasn’t that she was still in love with Cash. It was that she remembered the give of his hips before he’d grown into his height. It was that she knew he laughed too hard when someone tripped, knew that he liked to be outside when getting high, knew he always failed to account for the width of his shoulders when playing hide-and-seek, and knew that he probably hadn’t cried when he’d been told about Asher because he’d always tried to be strong back then.

It was that he was part of her home. And maybe she hadn’t realized that meant something to her, but now she did. Now a tiny part of her understood why these people, her people, would have closed ranks to protect one of their own.

You really don’t think Cash had anything to do with any of this?