Sound advice was given. Maybe your husband is right, tell her she has to leave if she doesn’t go to college . . . cut off the money . . . tough love . . . but what if it pushes her too far?

Fuck them. Fuck all of them and their box of shit.

Nic didn’t feel guilty about being alive. She felt guilty about the role she’d played in Annie being dead. Some things just were what they were.

At the end of that particular exchange was the summation of her mother’s terror.

I can’t lose another child.

Fuck. Fuck!

She would never be able to unsee those words.

Those words were never going to leave her head.

* * *

Officer Jared Reyes was waiting for her in the diner at nine-thirty—as promised. He looked at her with familiarity, like an old friend, though Nic hardly recognized him.

“Hey!” he said with a smile.

“Hi,” she said back. She was too exhausted to wonder if she knew him better than she was remembering. Those four days had been brutal.

“Thanks for meeting me.”

He touched her shoulder, gave it a squeeze. It felt good. Good enough to make her worry.

“Yeah, no problem. Want to grab a coffee?”

“Do I look like I need one?”

He smiled again and Nic found herself smiling back. It was a reflex with attractive men, and Reyes was attractive. She couldn’t decide what it was about him, but it was there. His face was average. Height, average. Not overweight. Some muscle tone, or just bulk, filling out the uniform in all the right places. No ring.

There was something between him and the waitress, a past maybe. Or anticipation about a future. She seemed irritated when Nic walked in and drew his attention.

Nic got a coffee to go. Reyes waited.

Outside, the officer stopped as they walked to the squad car—his eyes catching the blue Audi parked by the inn.

“I’m driving it now,” Nic said. “It’s nicer than mine.” But that was not the reason she’d been driving her mother’s car, which still smelled of her mother’s perfume and held her mother’s lipstick in the console.

Reyes nodded as though he got it—her need to be near any small part of her mother.

They turned right out of the diner and drove along Hastings Pass toward Route 7 and the Gas n’ Go. Reyes studied the fields on both sides. Brow furrowed. Eyes pensive.

“I’ve been up and down this road,” he said, glancing at the cornfields. “Must be a hundred times since your mother went missing. Every time, thinking about what we might have missed.”

Nic was surprised.

“I thought the investigation was closed.”