Sissy’s belief was that there could be no real normalcy without closure. Lauren didn’t know that there could be normalcy with closure, either.

What did closure even mean at this point?

Getting Leslie back? She still held out some hope that could happen, but it wouldn’t mean closure. One door would close, and another would open. There would be a long, long journey of healing ahead for Leslie—for all of them.

Did closure mean finding Leslie’s remains? One question would be answered, but the grief would be overwhelming and never ending.

Did it mean bringing Roland Ballencoa to justice?

What was justice?

She thought of her hour spent at the shooting range.

Body, body, head shot, breathe . . .

She had wished him dead a thousand times. Ten thousand times. She had imagined torturing him to death as he may have done to her daughter. She had imagined a dozen different ways to do it. Two dozen. But would she have closure after?

The stark, depressing truth was there was no such thing as closure. Tragedy was a heavy stone dropped in an ocean as still as glass. The effects rippled out and kept going and going and going . . .

Exhausted by the conundrum, Lauren walked out of the office. Too restless to go to bed, she wandered the house.

She had told Anne she would be fine to stay alone. After all, Leslie had not been taken from their home. No one had violated that space. But this house, on the end of a dead-end road, seemed even bigger at night. It was at night that she noticed all the large windows on the first floor and wondered why she hadn’t pushed Sissy to put in plantation shutters or drapes or something.

At night the views the windows had framed in daylight became gaping black holes. What was inside the house became the view to whatever eyes looked in from outside.

Chilled by the idea, Lauren pulled Lance’s old black cardigan sweater around her slender frame, imagining that it was Lance’s embrace wrapping around her, reassuring her. She hadn’t washed it in two years. She liked to believe it still smelled like him.

Even as she surrounded herself with the memory of him, she cursed him for leaving her, for leaving Leah. Now Leah had left her—if only for the night—and she was truly alone.

Like a cat in the night, Lauren prowled the first floor of the house in the dark. Beyond the house, a huge fat moon hung like a Chinese lantern in the sky, its quicksilver glow spilling over the countryside and in through the windows.

It was after two in the morning.