At the airport, the guys at the rental agency wanted to shoot the breeze. He forced himself to socialize a few minutes. He even told a dirty joke. Did you hear about the girl who was cheating on her boyfriend and he walks in on her … ? They laughed, they liked him. He had worked on their office building in exchange for hours with the plane. He had put in a new bathroom, reconfigured their walls so they had twice as much useful space.

Lack of cash was the biggest weakness in his plan. It was not like he could crash in the ocean with everything in his bank account suddenly withdrawn. Talk about raising a red flag. For the last four months he had been taking cash on most jobs. Building up a nest egg that never saw the inside of a bank. He had forty-five grand saved but that was not going to last. Then again, what kind of time frame was he talking about?

Frankly, he had no idea.

They let him go. Wished him happy birthday and good luck on his scuba lessons. No one worried about him flying from Catalina to Santa Barbara in the dark. But it was not as if he could leave Catalina at night. The runway had no lights. He had to depart at sunset, or immediately after. His plan required the dark. From now until he disappeared, timing was everything.

He forced himself to concentrate as he checked out the plane. Ninety-nine percent of the time the ritual was unnecessary. Study the hull for broken rivets. Test the radio and battery supply. See if the flaps were in sync. Look at the color of the fuel. The latter was a light blue, high octane, but as Matt stared at it he saw red. His heart pounded behind his eyes.

He talked to himself as he circled the plane. He was not bringing the Cessna back. He was ditching it in the dark ocean. Amy was not coming home to him. He was going to ditch her as well—into a bottomless well of agonizing loss. It was only right that they should suffer together.

But there would be a difference in their suffering.

He would know why. She would know nothing.

But when it came down to it, he still did not know why she had left him. She had loved him, he could not have been that deceived. So her love had been twisted—it had been real, David’s money and his baby aside. The question spun endlessly in his head.

Why?

In a way, Matt wished she could know it was he who was going to destroy her life. At least then she would know how much he still thought of her. He wondered if she ever thought about him—the single most devastating thought of all.