In the hall, she went to the window that looked out on the front yard, her skin crawling at the memory of last night. He had been out there, looking in at her. Tonight she had twice seen county cruisers turn around in front of the gate. Detective Mendez’s doing, she supposed.

She went downstairs and made yet another patrol, checking locks on doors and windows before going to the kitchen to fix a cup of tea. She thought again of Anne as she went about the task. She liked Anne’s no-nonsense yet compassionate way. She wondered if maybe Anne was the better person to help Leah on her path through the grief of losing her sister and her father. Lauren knew she herself wasn’t qualified to help anyone. For her to help Leah was like sending a person who couldn’t swim to save a drowning man. The blind leading the blind, as Anne had said.

She thought of little Haley Leone, the only witness to a terrible crime—her mother murdered literally before her very eyes. Anne and her husband had given the child stability, safety, security. Lauren didn’t feel as if she could offer any of those things to her own daughter—or even to herself.

She wondered how Leah would feel about talking with Anne.

Lauren curled into a corner of the sofa in front of the great room’s massive stone fireplace and sipped her tea. She thought of Leah before all of this had happened—Leah as a little girl Haley’s age and a little older—and realized she wasn’t exactly right in thinking her youngest didn’t share her feelings.

She remembered long quiet talks with Leah about all kinds of things—her love of butterflies and her kindness for children who were different or awkward, her sense of fair play and justice, her very serious concerns about hurting the feelings of her favorite dolls when she became too grown up to play with them.

No, Lauren thought, Leah wasn’t a child who closed herself off; she was a young lady too sensitive to her mother’s fragility. She was a shy younger sister pushed into the shadows by a sibling whose presence was huge and bright, even in her absence.

What a sorry excuse for a mother you are, Lauren.

She was more concerned with vengeance for the daughter she didn’t have than with being a parent to the daughter she did have.

She would talk to Anne.

Setting her cup on the coffee table, she picked up the pile of the day’s mail and began to sort through it. Bills and junk mail. An invitation to join a gym. A brochure advertising all the events of the upcoming summer festival of music.