She thought she should have been trying to draw her daughter out of her shell, into conversation, but every scenario she ran through in her head ended badly so she didn’t even try. The effort would have come across as desperate and phony. She didn’t want to put either of them through the awkwardness.

Leah had every right to be upset. Lauren had no words of wisdom. She had put the two of them in this place. She had no excuses. She had no solutions. She had made all of her promises and had promptly broken most of them. What was there to say?

She desperately wished she could think of something. She found herself absurdly thinking of the black-and-white wisdom of the television moms she had grown up on—Donna Reed and June Cleaver—who always managed to come up with some pearl of wisdom by the end of the half hour to reassure their children that all was right with the world.

All wasn’t right with the world. And it seemed like half of what was wrong was either directly or indirectly her own fault. Donna Reed had never been arrested for assault. June Cleaver had never contemplated hiring a hit man.

She was still stunned Greg Hewitt had made the offer. Twenty-five thousand dollars to end the life of Roland Ballencoa. She was even more stunned that she hadn’t rejected the idea on the spot. She knew the only reasons she hadn’t said yes were that her first priority was to find Leslie, to know what had happened to her, and second, that she wanted the satisfaction of killing Roland Ballencoa herself.

Their world had gone mad. How was she supposed to explain that to her fifteen-year-old daughter? She couldn’t, and so they left the house as they did every morning, going through the motions of what passed for normal. The usual twenty-minute drive to the Gracida ranch stretched out before them like the Bataan Death March, the silence between them as heavy as an anvil.

Lauren stood beside the door of the car, looking at her daughter across the black expanse of the roof. Leah looked back at her, wary, waiting. Unable to stand it any longer, Lauren finally blurted out: “I’m going to make an appointment with Anne Leone. For you.”

Leah gasped. “I’m not the crazy one attacking people!”

“I didn’t say you were crazy,” Lauren said. “But you have to deal with me, so we should just head that off at the pass. You can go to Anne and complain about me all you like. Tell her what a bad mother I am, and how I am single-handedly trying to ruin your life and mine.”

“It’s not funny,” Leah snapped.

“I’m not being sarcastic,” Lauren protested. “I know you’re miserable. You’re miserable. I’m miserable. We’re the Lawtons Les Misérable.