“I could tell Hope was nervous, so I assured her she didn’t need to try it if she didn’t want to. But she said she was fine and assumed her isosceles stance, just as Dad showed her. And then she pulled the trigger. He had given her a nine-millimeter, because she has those super tiny baby hands, plus that weird wrist thing.” Hope had recovered from the physical injuries sustained in the accident, with the exception of what was called partial radial nerve palsy in her left hand. She had regained most of the hand’s function over the years, but still had problems with her wrist strength. “Dad had warned her about the recoil, but it obviously caught her off guard. Dad felt awful, saying he should have started her off with a .22 to be safe. Even the mild kickback was so bad that she wasn’t remotely close to the paper target. But it was more than that. She was seriously rattled. I hadn’t seen her like that since the early days right after the car accident. She was physically trembling. I rushed her out of there as if we were under fire.”

“You think it triggered something in her? So to speak,” he added.

She knew she should probably take a break from talking about Hope, but she was on a roll. “I pressed her on it, wondering if her subconscious was reacting to the sound of the gun, but she insisted it didn’t feel like a lost memory. She said she was just upset that her left hand had let her down so badly. She’s learned so well to compensate for it, she didn’t even realize how weak it was. But now I’m replaying it all in my head. Maybe she pushed the idea away, not wanting to remember. She could have witnessed a shooting, or maybe someone threatened her with a gun, or even took a shot at her? They might have finally found her. The odds of anyone running into her in Hopewell were pretty low, but then she left the bubble. The move here could have been the thing to put her back on someone’s radar.”

Lindsay felt like she was on the right track, but something still felt wrong. Then she saw it. “The cause and effect could be the other way around. Maybe something scared her away from Hopewell. If someone turned up in Hopewell looking for her, maybe her gut told her to run. She asked Evan to tell her if anyone ever came around with questions about her.”

“But wouldn’t she tell you? She’d be safer in Hopewell where people know her. And your dad’s the former police chief.”

“Unless she panicked. As much as she has tried to get her old memories back, I know there’s a part of her that’s always been afraid to find out what she might have been running from.”