“Haley, come on!” The call came from a little redheaded girl on the swing set twenty feet away.

Anne kissed her daughter’s head again. “Go have fun, you. I have to get to work. I’ll see you at lunchtime. I love you.”

“I love you, Mommy,” Haley said with a wave as she trotted off toward her friends.

Anne watched her go, thinking—as she did every day—how lucky she was. She had looked death in the face more than once. Every day with her children was an enormous gift she never failed to appreciate.

She rested a hand on her stomach and said a little thank-you for the new life growing inside her. She was a lucky woman. She had a wonderful husband, beautiful children, a career she loved.

Then she thought of Lauren Lawton. Lauren had had a wonderful life too. She’d had a loving husband—now dead. She’d had two beautiful daughters—one gone.

She thought of Leah again, a trouble line creasing up between her brows.

Then, as if she had conjured her up, Lauren Lawton was walking toward her on the path.

“They told me at the desk you might be out here.”

She looked like hell, Anne thought. Pale and thin as a ghost, gaunt, with deep purple smudges beneath her eyes. She could have been a junkie strung out on heroin, or a cancer patient poisoned by chemotherapy.

“My morning ritual,” Anne said, showing none of the alarm that had struck her at the sight of the woman. “Haley and I have to have our little walk and talk before I can go to my office.”

Lauren looked over at the girls playing on the swings. “No one would ever guess she wasn’t your biological child. She looks just like you. Did you adopt her as a baby?”

“No,” Anne said. “Haley was four. Her mother was murdered. She was the only witness.”

Lauren looked at her, shocked, as most people were when Anne revealed her daughter’s tragic background. She had managed to shock Lauren twice now—with Haley’s story, and with her own—which she thought was a good thing.

In her experience, victims sometimes needed to be pulled out of their myopic self-absorption in their own terrible tales. Not to minimize what they had gone through, but to show them others had gone through terrible things too, and had worked their way through to move forward with their lives.

“Oh my God,” Lauren said. “Does she remember what happened ?”

“Some of it,” Anne said. “She used to wake up screaming every night. Gradually, we’ve worked through it with her. The most important thing she needed was to know that she was safe again.”

“I know the feeling,” Lauren said quietly, her eyes on Haley—laughing and happy. Anne suspected she envied the little girl that.