She smiled reflexively when she saw his face at the front door. It wasn’t like her response to the man at the gas station. She smiled at a neurological level, straight from some primal, emotional part of the brain.

It was the way a human face responds on instinct when a person sees someone from their past in an unexpected place.

It took her brain a few seconds to catch up to her facial muscles. He shouldn’t be here.

She turned to run, but he grabbed her arm. The feeling of his fingers digging into her skin burned hot with a distant memory. It had been fifteen years.

He leaned close toward her and smiled, nothing friendly about it.

“What kind of game are you playing, Hope? Isn’t that what you call yourself now?”

2
Saturday, June 12, 10:45 p.m.

Lindsay Kelly reread the text she had drafted: Haven’t heard from you for a few days. Is everything still okay?

Too anxious. She erased and tried again. I was thinking about coming out to see you next week. Too soon?

Six weeks before, when Hope suddenly declared that she was moving to East Hampton, Lindsay had played devil’s advocate, reminding her friend that she had a life in Hopewell. She had a community and security.

“But I don’t have privacy,” Hope had said. “Or anonymity. I just want to go someplace where I can blend in. I want to be normal.”

Lindsay could still recall the hurt expression on Hope’s face when she had responded, “You have no idea what you’re saying. I mean, it’s not like you even know whether you ever were normal.”

She regretted the words the second they escaped her lips. Even now, she didn’t really understand why she had allowed herself to say something so cruel. In that moment, Lindsay immediately vowed that she had to support her friend, no matter what she decided. And so, two weeks later, with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, Lindsay had helped Hope move to the eastern end of Long Island’s South Fork, riding the train from Penn Station to Princeton, where Hope had picked her up to go to U-Haul, where Lindsay rented the moving van she would drive while Hope followed in her own Honda Civic. Of course, in Hope’s case, “her” Honda Civic was also in Lindsay’s name—title, registration, insurance, all of it—but explaining a borrowed car from a friend was easier than an unauthorized driver on a rental in the event that they ran into a problem.

They had managed to pack all of Hope’s belongings from her garage apartment except for one piece of furniture—a solid oak armoire. Lindsay smiled to herself, recalling the ridiculousness of their failed attempt.