Cover

Dedication

For Danielle Holley-Walker

Epigraph

“Louise, no matter what happens, I’m glad I came with you.”

—Thelma

Prologue

From PATCH

Hopewell-Pennington, NJ

POLICE SEEK WITNESSES TO ROLLOVER CRASH

A woman was found on Tuesday night with critical injuries, not far from an overturned 1999 Toyota 4Runner. Emergency crews responded at 11:20 PM to a report of a single-car accident on East Mountain Road in the Sourland Mountain Preserve.

The survivor, described as a young woman estimated to be in her late teens or early twenties, was transported to Capital Health Medical Center, where she remains in critical condition. Law enforcement is asking any witnesses who may have information about the cause of the accident or the identity of the vehicle’s occupant to contact Hopewell Police.

1
Saturday, June 12, 6:32 p.m.
Fifteen Years Later

Hope Miller shifted her gaze from the gas nozzle to the pump. When the gallon counter hit twelve, she scolded herself for not filling up before her trip into the city. She couldn’t risk an empty tank.

The nearest customer leaned against his green Jeep, sharing her same awkward wait, watching the digital numbers tick by. She noticed him looking at her. When he noticed her noticing, he flashed a practiced grin. She didn’t smile back.

That phrase, “It takes more muscles to frown than smile”? She had googled it once. Turns out, facial descriptions are subjective. Smiles, sneers, frowns, and smirks are all in the eye of the beholder. And the so-called facial nerve controls forty-something muscles, but some people have all of them, while others are missing almost half.

But scientists did agree on one thing—that smiles are innate. Reflexive. And viewed across cultures as a sign of friendliness.

A single man smiling at a single woman alone at a gas station at night?

He could be flirting. Hope didn’t think of herself as pretty, per se, but how many times had Lindsay called her a magnet for male attention?

Or he could be suggesting that she smile back, the nonverbal version of those comments men let fly so freely around total strangers—“Smile, honey. It’s a beautiful night”—as if it’s their business how a woman holds her face.

Or, she wondered as she risked another glance in his direction, this particular man might know her. Was this simply random eye contact from a stranger, or the reflexive smile of a person who thought he recognized her from his past? She imagined him saying, Hey, aren’t you . . .

She pushed the thought away. He didn’t seem especially curious. He was simply one of those guys who smiled at strangers for no reason at all.

One of the many downsides of using cash at a gas station was having to guess how much to prepay. She had a credit card from Lindsay for emergencies but tried not to use it. She squeezed the pump handle—one, two, three—to top off the tank at the forty bucks she had already given the cashier inside, patting herself mentally on the back for being so close. Returning the nozzle to the pump, she forced a polite smile in the man’s direction.

As she climbed into the front seat of her Honda Civic—Lindsay’s car, technically, like her credit card—she noticed Jeep Guy finishing up as well, sparking her anxieties again. He seemed to move too fast, both in terms of how long it had taken to fill the tank of an SUV and how quickly he maneuvered himself behind the wheel. She started the ignition, not bothering with her seat belt until she was out of the station and onto the service road. In the rearview mirror she saw the Jeep follow, making the turn from the station without slowing.

She merged onto the LIE. So did the Jeep. She tried to tell herself that most of the cars in the area were on the same route. She stayed in the right lane, waiting for him to pass, but two miles later, he remained directly behind her. He wasn’t exactly tailgating, but not even an attempt to pass on the left? Maybe the types of friendly people who smile at strangers for no reason are the same oddballs who, like her, obey the speed limit at all times.

Her grip tightened around the steering wheel when the Jeep’s headlights followed her off Exit 70 onto Route 111. She scolded herself: Stop. Wigging. Out. It’s the weekend, and you’re on the main road to the Hamptons in the summer. He’s just one car.

A different set of headlights suddenly appeared in the left lane, maybe a quarter mile back, closing the distance. As the new arrival cruised beneath a streetlamp, she could see that the vehicle was a police car—white with lights on the roof. Her foot immediately moved from the gas pedal to the brake, her eyes drifting involuntarily to the speedometer. She was now ten miles an hour beneath the speed limit. Going too slow, like going too fast, was good cause for a traffic stop.

She gave the engine more gas, and then shifted her gaze to the rearview mirror again. The Jeep was still on her. Maybe if she were a different person, she would tail the cop in the white car, or even barrel past him on the right, triggering a stop. She could explain it was all because of Jeep Guy, with the worrisome smile, still following her after nine miles.

But Hope didn’t have the luxury of that option. Her explanation for not having a license (at all) or a registration (in her name, at least) could lead to worse allegations—intoxication, insanity, a stolen car, something. So Hope maintained a perfect forty-five miles per hour through Manorville, waiting for the cop to pass.

The police car was two lengths behind her before she realized that what she had assumed were overhead lights was actually a luggage rack, mounted on a regular old Chevy sedan. “Jerk,” she whispered to herself. There should be a law against strapping stuff to white cars.

Jeep Guy finally turned off the main road once they hit Westhampton. All that worry for nothing. How many times had her imagination gotten carried away during the last fifteen years? She was so relieved that she didn’t give a thought to the white pickup truck that replaced the Jeep in her rearview mirror.

Hope had been to the house only once previously, and that was when Evan had been pitching himself to get the broker gig. He only brought her along to make his one-man outfit appear bigger than it was, but she promised when he gave her the job that she was willing to take on any assignment he’d entrust to her—even today’s last-minute drive to Manhattan and back because one of his renters ran off with a set of keys.

The listing was a five-bedroom, four-bath in Sagaponack, on the south side (aka, the good side) of the Montauk Highway. Asking price: $2,999,900, to keep it from hitting the $3 million mark. It would never sell for that, but Evan dangled a high number to lure the owners into hiring him. Hope knew from the math the realtor had scribbled on the back of an envelope after the initial visit that he planned to push the couple to accept any all-cash offer over two-point-five. With an all-cash offer, Evan would write up the deal on paper as $2 million, and then put five hundred grand in the owners’ hands tax-free, using a point of his commission as necessary to sweeten the deal. The Stansfields—Stan and Robin, the couple that owned the house—had struck Hope as much too nice and normal to accept that kind of arrangement, but according to Evan, everyone out here did it. Sure, Evan—just like every legit realtor is willing to hire a former waitress who doesn’t have a social security number and needs to get paid in cash.

Evan was shady, no doubt, but he’d proven himself to be a good coach since she moved to town the month before. She had watched him set up open houses before, and he had taught her exactly how a property should look and feel and even smell to reel in a buyer right away.

Besides, this kind of task was right up her alley. How many times had she been told she had an obsessive eye for detail?

Three hours after her initial arrival at the house, she ran through her mental checklist. Decluttering was the fun part. Evan had the owner’s permission to tuck away distracting personal items such as family photos and knickknacks. The flowers she had purchased—at a deli in the city instead of a florist in East Hampton so she could pocket the extra cash she’d been given—were split between two vases in the living and dining rooms. The area rug she had brought as instructed from Evan’s office was in place in the front hallway to conceal the wear and tear on the floorboards. She even had the cinnamon rolls ready to go in a pie pan in the refrigerator. Evan could arrive tomorrow at noon and do nothing but turn on the oven. A hint of Barefoot Contessa, courtesy of Pillsbury.

Of course, none of these superficial touches should actually matter. This house, by $3 million South Fork standards, was a dump. Terra-cotta kitchen tiles, laminate countertops, dingy, dated wallpaper. The real draw of the house was the lot—two full acres on a dead-end road. Whoever bought this place would tear the house down and start all over. But in the Hamptons, even a teardown was supposed to be staged.

She had nearly completed her inspection when she spotted the problem. The windows!

“Hamptons buyers want a light, bright, airy home, not a man cave,” Evan had told her.

She quickened her pace with each additional shade pulled. All she could see outside was darkness. Standing alone in the isolated living room, backlit in front of all those windows, was giving her the heebie-jeebies.

She took one final look around the house. It was perfect. She sent a quick message to her boss: The place is all set. I did it tonight to make sure I didn’t run into a time crunch tomorrow morning. Thanks again for trusting me, Evan. Hope you and the kids are having the best time!

She returned the key to the lock box hidden on the back deck and locked the sliding glass kitchen door. The front door would lock automatically behind her. As she made her way to leave, Hope felt a surge of pride. She had found this job entirely on her own—no help from Lindsay or anyone else from Hopewell. And she was actually good at it. Maybe if people got to know her as Evan’s assistant—instead of “poor Hope”—she could eventually find work as an interior decorator, or maybe one of those professional organizers who streamlines a house from top to bottom. She could find clients through Yelp and Instagram and get paid in cash. Lord knew there was plenty of money to be had in the Hamptons.

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.

“All right. We’re taking this armoire,” Hope had announced, “and that’s all there is to it.” It was a reference to both a classic Seinfeld episode and the fact that Lindsay had, in fact, taken the armoire after finding it abandoned on the curb with a “Free” sign taped to it. She discovered later that a visiting professor at Princeton had bought the armoire from one of the vendors at the Antique Center and then ditched it in the front yard at the end of the semester when he decided that schlepping it back to his permanent residence in New York City wasn’t worth the effort.

They managed only to tip the clunky wardrobe onto the floor horizontally before Hope burst out in laughter, wiping her palms on the baggy denim cutoffs she had worn for the move. “Oh my god, it seems even bigger now that it’s empty.” She had tugged her sandy blond hair from the long ponytail at the nape of her neck, shaken it loose, and then pulled it into a sloppy topknot instead. “Gross, I’m super sweaty. How did we even get this thing up here in the first place?”

“You don’t remember?” Lindsay had done her best to impersonate Hope trying to wrangle the thing down the street by herself, one scoot at a time. “Tony made Max and Bobby carry it for you once they all stopped laughing.” Tony and Grace Beckett were Hope’s landlords, and Max and Bobby were their now-grown sons.

A look of recognition had washed over Hope’s face. That’s when Lindsay said the armoire might be trying to send a message that it wasn’t too late to unload the van and stay put. Before Hope could respond, Lindsay had jumped in to clarify. “I just want to make sure you’re a hundred thousand percent certain before we break our backs getting this lead-filled coffin down the stairs.”

It wasn’t that Lindsay was unsympathetic to Hope’s complaints about Hopewell. Lindsay loved her hometown, but there was a reason she had opted to stay in Manhattan after graduating from law school. In a borough of fewer than two thousand people, not too many of them were strangers, and Hope had it worse than the usual resident. When she first arrived, everyone was curious about her. She was a walking, talking, living, breathing real-life mystery. But over the last decade and a half, Hope had woven herself into the fabric of the community, and it was precisely because of the incestuousness of their small town that Lindsay knew Hope would always be safe in Hopewell. The doctors still took care of her pro bono, even for things that had nothing to do with her original trauma. She had a rent-free garage apartment, thanks to Tony and Grace, the couple who organized the first prayer circle after word got around town about the stranger who turned up at the hospital with life-threatening injuries but no identification. All they asked in return was that she watch the house when they left for their frequent camping trips. The police understood why she couldn’t have a driver’s license, and also knew that their beloved ex-chief—Lindsay’s father—considered Hope a second daughter, so they pretended not to see her on those occasions when they spotted her behind the wheel.

She had worked her way up to manager at Rex’s Diner, all the while getting paid under the table. Lindsay supposed she could take credit for that one. The owner wasn’t a Rex, as the name would suggest; she was a Miriam and had practically raised Lindsay from the time she was seven years old, thanks to the eight years she had been married to Lindsay’s father.

When Hope was in Hopewell, Lindsay knew that she was being looked after—by her father, by the Becketts, by Miriam, by that tight-knit community that had apparently come to feel like an anchor around Hope’s waist.

In a way, Lindsay blamed herself for Hope’s decision to leave. She had been the one to invite Hope to tag along two months before to look at a Hamptons rental she was considering for the summer. No surprise, given the price, that the place turned out to be a dump, but Lindsay and Hope had spent the weekend checking out the shops and restaurants that would soon be too crowded when summer rolled around. They even took a fishing trip as an excuse to get out on the open water. After a third man made some not-too-subtle moves in their (meaning, Hope’s) direction, Hope had announced a new life plan: she’d meet a rich man and spend the rest of her life at a beach house. By the close of the weekend, Hope was saying she was serious about not wanting to leave.

Nine days after returning to Jersey, without telling Lindsay, Hope took the train back to Long Island, renting a backyard Winnebago off Craigslist for $70 a night so she could determine if the Hamptons really might be the right place for her to “start over.” She later explained that, the way she figured, the area was bustling enough to provide the anonymity she yearned for, without the big-city chaos that—to her knowledge, at least—she had never experienced. Due to its popularity as a vacation spot, it drew plenty of short-timers and newcomers, so she’d blend in from the outset. And in her words, it was “the right amount of shady.” Rich people who bought beach houses under LLCs, perhaps tossing some unreported cash around in the wash along the way, would have no qualms about paying her for work under the table if it meant they didn’t have to cover the payroll taxes. She was confident she could find a landlord and an employer who were willing to deal in cash, at least for the right kind of person.

Hope’s gut instincts must have been right, because when she called Lindsay at the end of her trip, she had found both a house and a job. The owner of Hope’s tiny cottage was an older woman who needed to go to Indiana for six months to take care of her even older mother. She wanted someone responsible to cover the costs of keeping the house running and to watch over the place in her absence. Lindsay was mortified when Hope confessed that she’d “borrowed a few details” from Miriam’s biography to explain her need to live “off the grid.” Hope justified it by pointing out that, unfortunately, Miriam’s harrowing move to Hopewell to flee an abusive boyfriend wasn’t especially unique. It turned out Miriam hadn’t minded one bit, assuring Hope that if what she went through could help another woman in even a tiny way, she was all for it. Once Lindsay and Miriam provided glowing personal references, the owner was willing to accept cash as rent. Done.

Lindsay was more concerned about Hope’s job. She had started with the big property management companies and realtors, thinking they would need seasonal help to turn over the short-term rentals. She got a few nibbles, but even with her Miriam-inspired cover story, they all balked at the idea of paying her in cash. But then she’d found an “independent” realtor named Evan Hunter. Lindsay had googled him, of course. He looked slick. Like, literally slick. Dewy skin. Lips that looked freshly licked. Blond hair swept back with plenty of product. At best, he’d pawn all his work off on Hope without cutting her in on his lucrative commissions, knowing she had few options. Or worse, he’d try to use his power over her in other ways. He wouldn’t be the first to try to take advantage.

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