“Horrible nickname.”

“It gets worse. It’s a terrible joke. My parents honeymooned in Calais so I’m Grace Calais. Princess Grace and Grace Kelly… Madness.”

“Your middle name is Calais?” A memory came to Nora like a face remembered from a dark dream. She stood up and walked to where Grace still stood at the window.

How do you choose your safe word? Zach had asked.

Pick anything. The street you grew up on, your favorite food, the middle name of the long-lost love of your life…

“I did lie to you, Grace,” Nora finally said and waited for Grace to meet her eyes. Nora reached out and put her hand on Grace’s arm. Grace covered Nora’s hand with her own. “He wasn’t with me last night at all.”

* * *

Long after Grace had left, Nora sat at the kitchen table and stared at nothing until her eyes watered.

Wesley and Zach…somehow without trying she had lost them both. Zach would turn from her and Wesley she had turned away. A realization came upon her with the unavoidable force of the night after the day. She rose from her chair and returned to her bedroom. She threw open the closet door and pushed back the racks of clothes. On the back wall impaled on a nail hung a set of deep red rosary beads with a small key hidden behind the crucifix.

She took the key and dropped to her knees. From the farthest corner of her closet she pulled out a wooden box the size of a small Bible. With shaking hands she opened it and took from a bed of blood-red velvet the white leather collar that had once bound her to Søren, the collar she had not worn in five years.

Rising from the floor she left the key in the lock and left the box on the floor. She left no note for Wesley and she left on all the lights. She threw on her coat, found her car keys, and taking nothing with her but her collar, she left. She pulled out of the driveway at breakneck speed and not once did it occur to her to look back.

CHAPTER 34

Zach had heard of sleeping with one’s eyes open but not of dreaming that way. But after a two-hour wait, two hours with his eyes on the hotel entrance, he knew his mind must be asleep. And when Grace walked in, saw him and smiled as if the two years of the cold and quiet hell they’d been living in had vanished into thin air, he knew he could only be dreaming.

He stood up and shoved his hands in his pockets, afraid if he didn’t he’d drag her to him.

“Hiya,” he said, not knowing what else to say.

“Hiya.” It was her, her voice, his Grace.

“I was waiting for you.”

“I see that. I tried to call you. Several times. When I didn’t hear from you, I called Mr. Bonner. I told him it was an emergency. He gave me—”