Tish shrugged. “I have no idea.”

“That’s strange. I’d think you’d remember what you were doing the night your best friend was brutally murdered.”

“You’re making too much of this,” Tish said. She stood up, and the chair toppled backward into the sand behind her. “Laura was killed by a stalker. You’ve got Peter’s DNA. It’s up to you now.”

“I have one more question,” Stride told her. “And you’d better answer this one.”

Tish folded her arms in annoyance. “What?”

“When did Cindy show you a photo of our house?”

Tish’s mouth fell open. Stride thought she had slipped, that she had said something she never intended to share. “I don’t know. It was probably something she included with a Christmas card.”

“Stop lying to me. You said Cindy showed you a photograph. She didn’t send it to you. She was with you. When was this?”

“A few months before she died,” Tish admitted.

“Where?”

“She visited me in Atlanta.”

Stride searched his memory. In those last terrible months, Cindy had begun to wrap her mind around the fact that she was dying, that the treatment options had finally run out. The only time he could remember her being gone was a weekend where she went off by herself, vanishing from his side for three long days. To make peace with the past, she said. She never told him where she went or anything about her trip. Back then, he had been afraid that she might commit suicide to spare him and herself the agony of a slow death. He now knew that she had gone to see Tish.

Someone she had never mentioned to him in her entire life.

Why?

“You owe me the truth,” Stride said.

Tish picked up the fallen chair and steadied it in the sand. She sat down again but didn’t look at Stride.

“Cindy first wrote to me about fifteen years ago,” Tish said. “It was shortly after her father died.”

“Did you know William Starr?”

“Enough to despise him.”

Stride nodded. He remembered the long weeks in which Cindy had sat at her father’s bedside while he waged a losing battle with cancer. William Starr had always been a hard man to like. Judgmental. Rigid. Obsessed with righteousness and punishment and all the while terrified of going to hell for his own sins. Death has a way of softening even the toughest of men. Stride remembered Cindy holding her father’s hand, listening to him weep, giving him absolution in a way that no priest ever could.

“Cindy had no illusions about her father,” he said.

“Neither did Laura. She loved him despite everything he did to her, but I knew he was a gutless piece of shit. He cheated on their mother, did you know that? Multiple times. Laura heard them arguing about it.”

“Why did Cindy contact you when he died?”

Tish hesitated. “I guess when she lost him, it brought up all her old emotions about Laura. It’s that aloneness you feel when your family is gone. So she thought of me. She knew how close Laura and I were, and she decided to rekindle a friendship with me.”