Robbie had turned toward the choking sound…and the instant he’d seen her, he’d bolted across the distance as fast as he could go. As he’d slammed into her arms, his clothes had been dirty and his hair shaggy and he’d smelled like burnt macaroni and cheese. But he lived and breathed and was in her arms.

He hadn’t cried then, however. And he hadn’t cried since.

Hadn’t spoken of his father or those three months, either. Even to the therapists she’d taken him to.

Marie-Terese had assumed that the worst part of the experience had been not knowing whether the son she had birthed and loved was alive or not. His coming home was just another hell, though. She wanted to ask him if he was all right every minute of every day, but obviously she couldn’t do that. And every once in a while, when she cracked and put the question out there, he just told her he was fine.

He was not fine. Could not possibly be fine.

The details the PI had been able to give her were sketchy. Her husband had taken Robbie across the country, going from rental car to rental car, and living off of a host of aliases and a massive cash stash. It had turned out that he’d kept a low profile for a couple of reasons—because it wasn’t just Marie-Terese who’d been looking for him.

And to keep Robbie from trying to escape, it was likely that Mark had bullied him. Which made her want to kill her ex-husband.

After she’d gotten Robbie back and filed for divorce, she’d run as far away from where they’d lived as she could, surviving on money she’d taken from Mark and jewelry he’d bought her. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been enough to live off of for long, not after the lawyers’ fees, the PI’s bill, and the cost of reinventing herself.

What she had ended up doing for money made her think about Job. She was willing to bet when the tide had turned against him he hadn’t known what hit him: One minute he was fine and dandy; the next he’d been stripped of everything that had defined him and been taken so low that surely he’d thought of doing things to survive that once would have been incomprehensible.

She was the same. She never would have seen this coming. Not the descent downward or the hard landing as she’d bottomed out and turned to prostitution.