If there was one thing Tully had always done well, it was to ignore unpleasantness. For most of her life she’d been able to box up bad memories or disappointments and store them deep in the back of her mind, in a place so dark they couldn’t be seen. Sure, she dreamed about the bad times, and woke occasionally in a cold sweat with memories on the oily surface of consciousness, but when daylight came, she pushed those thoughts back into their hiding place and found it easy to forget.

But now, for the first time, she’d found something she could neither file away in the darkness nor forget.

Chad. Seeing him like that, standing there in her adopted city, had shaken her to the core. She couldn’t seem to dislodge the memory. There was so much she hadn’t said to him, hadn’t asked.

In the three months since they’d run into each other, she found herself remembering every detail, going over the seconds like a forensic scientist, looking for clues to the meaning of it all. He became a kind of marker for everything she’d given up for this life of hers. The road she hadn’t taken.

And even worse than all of that was the memory of what he’d said about Cloud. You’re not alone, Tully. Everyone has a family. Those weren’t precisely the words, but they were close enough. The gist of it.

Like a cancerous cell, the idea replicated in her mind and grew. She found herself thinking of Cloud, really thinking. She focused on the times her mother came back for her instead of the times she left. It was dangerous, Tully knew, to hang on to the positive when so much negative existed, and yet, she wondered suddenly if that had been her mistake. Had she been so intent on hating her mother, on shelving and forgetting the disappointments, that she’d missed the meaning of Cloud’s many returns?

The thought of that, the hope of it, wouldn’t fit in her box, wouldn’t remain in the dark.

Finally, she quit running from the idea and sat down and studied it. That had led her to this strange and frightening journey. She had taken two weeks off of work, called it a vacation, packed a suitcase, and boarded a plane heading west.

A little less than eight hours after she left Manhattan, she was on Bainbridge Island, pulling up to the Ryan house in a sleek black limousine.