She pulls my hair so my head is forced closer to her ear.

I wince but I do not complain.

Be patient, I say to myself, even as I hear the words she says next. Words that make me gasp in the cold air.

“The end,” she says. And then she gives me a kiss.

Chapter Twenty-four

Day sixteen

Nic awoke with a hangover and scattered memories. It was both familiar and unnerving.

She did not linger in bed. Instead, she went straight to the bathroom and ran a shower. She stepped in while it was still cold and let the water sting her skin.

She brushed her teeth, downed four Advil.

Her head still ached from the four drinks with Officer Reyes. From going to bed drunk.

Then she remembered that she’d had to leave her mother’s car at Laguna. Reyes had driven her here, back to the inn, walked her to her room.

But that was all. She was certain. Although not for lack of trying.

Shit. What had she done, exactly? Tried to kiss him. Pulled him into her room? And he’d wanted to, hadn’t he? She’d felt his body respond. Now she was grateful he’d resisted. She needed someone to help her find her mother. Not another stranger she had to kick out of her bed in the morning.

But it had been more than raw need last night. It was the story he’d told her, which she was also now remembering. A story worthy of four drinks and a new perspective on Officer Jared Reyes. It explained why he’d come to Hastings, and why he had such a strong alliance with Chief Watkins.

Reyes had been involved in a shooting when he was a rookie back in his hometown, in Worcester, three hours north of here. A lone gunman had been lurking outside a school. Stalking the grounds, waiting, as it turned out, for the police to arrive. Waiting so he could draw them close, then pull his own weapon, forcing them to shoot. Forcing them to kill him. But his gun had been a toy, a fake. Reyes had killed an unarmed man in a suicide by cop. She could have listened to him all night, talking about the emotional pain that was now a deep scar he’d learned to live with.

Nic looked in the bathroom mirror, stared into her own eyes to see if she was remembering all of this right.

Reyes had described his memory of the young man falling to the ground. The blood pooling around his torso. The way it entered his own body as a fantasy, a scene from a movie. And then the rush of something vile as his brain processed reality. And this vile something changed every cell in his body in an instant. Every single cell. Those had been his words. But they were also Nic’s.