That can’t happen. And yet I’m not sure of how to prevent it from happening. And the horrible truth is that the white-collar stuff that I’m hoping to expose might very well directly involve Micah. Bringing down the Gables will be a dangerous task, but to take down a mob boss with them? That’s a death-defying feat.

So question number one is, do I have the ability to defy death?

And question number two is, what about Lander?

I pick up a handful of bills and flip through them, trying to make them create that sound, the sound money makes in the movies when the bad guy holds a rubber-banded stack of bills to his ear and makes them rustle like a deck of cards. In the movies he can tell how many bills are there just by listening to that noise.

It’s total bullshit, of course. Bills can never sound like plastic cards. You can’t count money by listening to it any more than you can get to know Lander by watching him from afar.

I wish I had worked that out earlier, the part about Lander. I had pegged him as a movie-style villain. If that had been the case, I would have made sure he was also implicated in whatever crimes Travis was up to. I would have made Jessica’s disappearance look like a conspiracy hatched by the two brothers. Travis and Lander would have spent most of their time trying to prove each other’s guilt and very little time working together in a productive manner.

But Lander isn’t a movie villain. He’s Lander. And I don’t want to treat him like he’s his brother’s clone, because he’s not. They deserve different fates.

I know what fate Travis deserves. I’m not sure about Lander.

I know what I want him to be deserving of. I want him to be deserving of me. I’m fully aware that’s a punishment of sorts, perhaps for both of us. But I’d like to think it’s a fitting punishment. It’d be nice to think that we’re Catherine and Heathcliff, or Valmont and Merteuil from Dangerous Liaisons. All completely screwed-up individuals who were cursed to love and torture each other. A lifetime of love and torture at the hands of one special individual. It’s all any of us can reasonably ask for. The perfectly happy, all-American families with their white-picket-fence homes and ice-cream-soda weekends? Norman Rockwell dreamed those people up between his wife’s depressive-alcoholic episodes.

And that Disney princess dream, complete with the prince and the horse and the pretty white castle? I gave that up on the day they took my mother from me.

But now, for the first time in my life, I find myself craving something else. I have a new dream, one that doesn’t directly involve revenge.

For the first time I find myself longing for the torture of love.