What a mess she’d made of their lives. She should have been her daughter’s rock. Another mother would have focused on making her remaining child feel safe and loved in the wake of losing both her big sister and her father. Bound up in her own anger and grief and guilt, Lauren had left her daughter to deal with her own feelings.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, she had put her child in danger as well. She had brought Leah here, and now Ballencoa knew where they lived.

She tried to rationalize. Ballencoa had known where they lived in Santa Barbara. He could have come there any time. Instead, he had finally left town and gone to San Luis Obispo.

Those facts didn’t make her feel any better. Another fact remained: that she had come to Oak Knoll knowing he was here. She had brought Leah here knowing full well that she would at some point confront Roland Ballencoa.

Her intent had been clear in her mind. If no one was going to help her, if no one was going to do anything about him, if he was never going to give up the truth of what he had done to Leslie, then she was going to have to help herself, do something about him herself, get the truth out of him any way she could.

She had somehow managed to embrace that intent and believe that her actions would be somehow separate from her life with her daughter. Like they could live in a bubble from which she could come and go with her gun and her dark intentions, and none of that would touch Leah.

What a mess.

She felt mired in it now. Any decision she could make would be wrong because only wrong decisions had brought her to this place.

Was she supposed to be a mother to the daughter she had or the avenger for the daughter she had lost? Everything in her fought against the idea of letting Leslie go. She could never release the idea of what if? What if Leslie wasn’t dead? What if she gave up on her child one day too soon? She couldn’t do it. Then what did that make her to Leah?

The conundrums spun around in her brain like hornets trapped in a box. The one overriding thought she kept having was: Leah would be better off with no mother than with the mother that she was.

She and Leah had had their cry together. She had said all the right and motherly things. She had promised to do better, drink less, eat more, put Daddy’s gun away. Lies and lies and more lies.