I waited until I heard him leave, the garage door opener whirring open and then shut, before I got up. I showered and dressed quickly. James had already made coffee, so I poured a cup into a travel mug, grabbed a banana from the fruit bowl on the counter, and headed out the door.

My plan was to make the three-hour round-trip drive to Miami while James was at work. Diana Barlos still hadn’t returned my phone call, so I decided to go to her boutique, The Pink Tortoise, and speak to her in person. It might be a fool’s errand. For all I knew, she had sales staff to cover the store and didn’t spend her days there. But I had to try. From what Nico had told me, Diana might be the only one who’d remember all the details from that ill-fated weekend, which would make it well worth the long trip.

I merged onto I-95 and headed south. It was a bright, clear day, with only a few cotton puffs of clouds stretched across the light-blue sky. The traffic was light at first but got heavier and more aggressive the farther south I drove. I tried to keep my attention on the road, but I couldn’t seem to stop my thoughts from drifting to James.

I knew that the last few days had been stressful for him. Hell, being a suspect in a murder investigation would be upsetting for anyone. But I sensed that there was something deeper troubling James.

Was it possible my husband was still in love with Hannah Nilsson?

It had been decades since they dated, but their relationship hadn’t sputtered out, the way it did when two people gradually grew apart. Nor had it come to a definitive end with disagreements or one of them falling in love with someone else. Instead, Hannah had been ripped out of James’s life in the most terrible, disturbing way imaginable. He’d fallen asleep one night with her tucked in beside him in their shared tent. When he awoke, she was gone, never to return.

And for twenty-five years, James hadn’t even known how or when or where she’d died. He’d had to live with that uncertainty. The how was still a mystery, but the where and when had become suddenly, vividly clear. And my husband wasn’t just grief stricken—no, I’d seen him grieve before. I’d comforted him when his father passed away suddenly from a heart attack ten years earlier. A few years later, his mother had followed, although this time it was after a long battle with sarcoma. I had witnessed my husband’s grief, had seen his eyes fill with tears, had felt his hand reach for mine.

But this was different. It was what I had sensed the night before: James wasn’t turning toward me in his grief. He was turning away from me in his heartbreak.