“Married, not married, I don’t care,” I said, before I realized this was a less than tactful way to put it. “I do care,” I said hastily. “I mean, I love you and being with you is what I want. I don’t care about the marriage part of it. Shit, that wasn’t right either.”

“We’ll do what’s right when the time comes,” Tolliver said, in a voice heavy with elaborate unconcern.

Apparently he did want to get married. Why couldn’t he just say so? I put my hands over my face, which felt strange because they were tingling from the Icy Hot.

Of course I would marry him, especially if it was a make-or-break issue of our relationship. I would do almost anything to get him to stay.

That wasn’t a romantic realization. I lay there thinking, listening to Tolliver’s fingers touch the keyboard. I thought, If anything happens to him, I might as well die. I wondered if that said a lot for Tolliver—or not much for me.

There was a knock at the door of our room. We looked at each other, puzzled. Tolliver shook his head; he wasn’t expecting anyone, either.

He got up and pulled the curtain back a little. He let it drop back into position. “It’s Lizzie Joyce,” he said. “With her sister. Kate, right?”

“Right.” I was as startled as he was. “Well,” I said. “What the hell?” We gave each other little shrugs.

Tolliver, having decided they weren’t armed and dangerous, let the Joyce sisters inside. I pulled my jeans back on and rose to greet them.

You’d think they’d never seen a middle-of-the-road motel before. Kate and Lizzie examined the room with nearly identical slow scans. The sisters looked a lot alike. Katie was a little shorter than Lizzie, and maybe two years younger. But she’d colored her hair the same blond as Lizzie’s, and her brown eyes were narrow like Lizzie’s, and her lean build was the same, too. They were both wearing jeans, boots, and jackets. Lizzie had slicked her hair back into a ponytail at the nape of her neck, while Katie’s was loose and bouncy. Between necklaces, earrings, and rings, I figured they each were wearing a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry. (After a subsequent trip to a mall store, I revised that figure upward.)

Katie’s eyes were avid as she examined Tolliver. She wasn’t so enthusiastic about our paraphernalia: our clothes, his crossword puzzle book, the open laptop, his shoes put neatly by his suitcase.

“Hello, Ms. Joyce,” I said, trying to inject my voice with some warmth. “What can I do for you?”

“You can tell me again what you saw when you stood on Mariah Parish’s grave.”

It took me a second to recall. “Your father’s caregiver,” I said. “The one who had the childbirth problems. The infection.”