“Lisa…” He searched his wife’s face. No secrets, right? But she had already pulled out her phone. She apologized for needing to make a call—that minute, apparently—and then stayed on her cell phone through all the time it took to pack up her things in Darren’s hotel room and have him walk her to her car in the lot around back. She hung up in time for him to say, “Drive safely, Lis. And call when you get home.” She nodded and gave him a cool, dry kiss on the cheek. Without saying anything about it, he followed her all the way out to Highway 59 and past Marshall as she headed south. At some point in the evening he’d lost sight of Bo and his rusty van, and he wanted to make sure his wife wasn’t being tailed.

There was a hurt coming, he knew that, a rumble of dark clouds that had gathered strength when Darren wasn’t looking, when he’d left Lisa and Greg alone at the table with their secrets. Still, he felt an odd gratitude for the pain on his horizon, for what it signified, for what it freed him to do.

16.

16.

HE’D HAD her phone number for weeks.

There’d been contact since Lark, since their goodbye in Dallas, when he’d touched her for the first time, holding both of her hands outside the medical examiner’s office where the body of her estranged husband waited to be claimed. But it had always been her reaching out to him, leaving a message to let him know she was burying Michael in his hometown of Tyler after all, that she’d brought the East Texas boy home, and asking if Darren would like to be at the service. It would just be the two of them, she’d said. His parents were gone, his uncle Booker too, of course, and the memorial service with law-school friends and colleagues from his firm had been at the North Shore home of his managing partner, a kind man who wore a dark cardigan instead of a suit and didn’t know enough about Michael to even utter the word Texas in his eulogy. That’s what sold it for Randie, the moment she decided Darren had been onto something about letting Michael’s soul rest in East Texas. And then there was the postcard she’d sent just a few weeks ago, writing that she was working a gig with a designer in Dallas. Which was only a couple of hours from where Darren was sitting, alone on the edge of a hotel bed that still smelled of the last act of his marriage, rank and faintly sour. Fermented came to mind, a sweet that had turned. He looked down at the cell phone he’d been holding for ten minutes.

And then he called her.