Her hair was still damp from the long shower she’d taken as soon as she got home, but Lindsay had seen the toll that a night in custody inflicted on first-timers. Whatever smell Hope thought she detected was likely etched in her mind forever.

The last hour had been arduous, both physically and mentally. They had managed to get the cottage back into order. As they worked, they also talked through next steps to protect Hope from whatever the DA’s office was planning for the future.

But Lindsay knew she was preoccupied. When she heard the whistle of the Long Island Railroad in the distance, she pictured Scott on the train. She had sent him one text since he walked away from her at the courthouse. I’m not pushing you, but please let me know when you’re ready to talk.

He had not replied.

Hope must have sensed where her mind had wandered, because she offered yet again to call Scott and explain that the prosecutor’s office had completely overblown one journal entry about one drunken evening.

Lindsay shook her head. “You have other things to worry about right now. He’ll come around.” Even though Lindsay didn’t buy her own assurances, she also knew that Hope was the last person Scott would want to hear from. “Let’s go back to what Alex said to you that night. He said ‘What kind of game are you playing?’”

“Yeah, I think those exact words. My best guess is that when I showed up on his boat, he must have recognized me. But when I didn’t acknowledge any recognition of him, maybe it set him off.”

“Except in a normal situation like that, a person would say, like, ‘Hey, don’t I know you?’ He must have had a reason for not asking you directly. And it probably comes back to Richard Mullaney. You’re sure you don’t remember anything about him?”

Hope shook her head. “But going back to Alex, he must have seen me again once I moved here and thought I was messing with him somehow. So that’s why he followed me and finally asked me what game I was playing. I can’t even remember everything I said, I was so frantic. But I tried to explain I had amnesia.”

Lindsay shut her eyes against a wave of her own memories. Hope, unresponsive on the side of the road as Lindsay waited next to her in the downpour, and then reaching for her hand from the gurney. Scott, a confident grin on his face, when he asked her to move in four months ago. Hope, dragged away in handcuffs, her eyes pleading with Lindsay to help. Scott’s back as he walked away from the courthouse.