Disturbed by the tenor of the articles, Sara stopped reading for a minute and concentrated on taking slow, even breaths. She felt a panic attack creeping up on her, the kind that before would have had her reaching for the Vicodin. But she couldn’t do that, wouldn’t. She had to learn how to handle emotion on her own, without chemical intervention.

She sucked in another deep pull of air. She hadn’t expected to feel the clawing scratch of anxiety from flipping through these papers, but there was something about the casual disregard of everyone in the articles for Anne Donovan, the woman. She almost seemed an afterthought, a happy means to air their grievances, concerns, but not worth noting beyond the gruesome, sensationalist aspects of her death. They seemed to take delight in mentioning how she’d been mutilated, but no one bothered to say where she came from, how she had found herself in the position of prostitute, or if she had left behind a grieving family.

It was so much like the media coverage of her own mother’s murder that the parallels scared Sara. That had been difficult for her to learn to deal with, to let go of the hatred, disgust, annoyance, when the newspaper turned her mother’s case into an opportunity to blast the prosecutor. It had never been about her mother. It was about the flaws in the police department, the stubborn prosecutor, and his determination to push through a weak case against Rafe. Everyone had their damn agenda, and no one cared that she had lost her mother.

But it bothered her that all of that baggage could resurface so easily, that she couldn’t maintain distance. God, she just wanted everything to be over and done, gone. She wanted to be normal again.

“You okay?”

Sara sat up straight, mortified. Gabriel was looking at her, but she appreciated that instead of pity or horror on his face, he just looked mildly curious.

“Yeah, I’m okay.” She was. She would be okay. If she just willed it enough, it would happen. It would. Because she understood something about herself. Even in the worst, horrific moments, she could still reach out and find hope. It would be better eventually. She just had to fight to get there, to not lose it along the way.

And there was something about Gabriel St. John looking at her, his dark brown eyes assuring her that he had secrets too, that he had suffered, that had her opening her mouth and saying, “There aren’t just physical parallels between this case and my mother’s murder, there are also media similarities. I guess I wasn’t expecting that—it startled me.”