In this way we’d made our girls, so different from each other and yet both so clearly ours. In this way we’d made Robert. I was aware of that, every second as I rocked him, his face hidden in my shoulder. I felt his tears on my neck, and then he was shuddering into me, and even as his body shook, I regretted his vasectomy. Robert’s absence emptied out the act in such strange ways.

He turned me, turned us both, still mostly dressed, until he was on his back and I lay sideways with my head resting on his chest. He had one arm around me, my leg thrown over both of his. His free hand slid between us, touching me, precisely, correctly. This was Trey, who knew me. This was a man I knew.

He always made it good for me. For sixteen years now, Trey worked to make everything in our life good for me. Part of me was thinking, Tomorrow I may lose him. Or we could lose our boy, which will break us in a thousand ways. This might be the last time I am with him. And so I let it happen. I let him make it happen. Then I cried and cried and cried, and he held me, until the crying was more of a release than the sex had been.

In the quiet dark that followed, I listened to him breathing for a while. Then I whispered, “If Marshall can’t find Lexie—”

“He will,” Trey said.

“I have to meet her mother, whether he finds her or not. I have to go.”

“I know,” Trey said. “I’m going with you.”

“No,” I said, not sure if I meant no. We could not lose Robert. But how could we trade Trey? I should go alone. She liked me. I could beg.

“I’m going,” he repeated.

I said nothing. I was so grateful and afraid. We held each other, and I think we dozed. I did at least. I was so tired, and there was nothing we could do. Nothing but hope, and pray, and hold each other through the long darkness, waiting for Marshall to arrive with Lexie Pine. Or not.

19

Animals go to ground where they feel safe, Marshall knew, and humans were animals. It was instinct, operating underneath all the fancy curls of gray matter, down in the low parts of the brain. Home territory was so fundamental a concept, so basic, that it could trip up even the cleverest of criminals.

But there was an exception to this rule: addicts.

Addicts couldn’t go back. Once in their old haunts, they started using again. His leads would not take him anywhere that clean and sober Lexie might be found.

He had to look earlier. Thirty to fifty years earlier. He had to find her in her childhood.