My eyes met Trey’s, blinking, and for a moment I didn’t understand.

Trey got it, though. “Lexie Pine is dead?”

Over his shoulder the glass doors swished open again. A gaggle of men in suits came out and walked toward the hotel. The dark garage behind them looked like a cave mouth, black and haunted, the gold of Lexie’s hair gleaming somewhere deep inside it.

Marshall said, “Yeah. No DNA confirmation yet, of course, but the body had her ID on it. ID and some heroin. The M.E.’s best guess is that she overdosed. Months ago.”

“Months ago?” I echoed.

Impossible. Coral had said that Lexie was watching me, that Lexie had been at the firm’s gala, secreted on a dark path or one of the shadowed bridges, making sure that Spence died. Coral had told me it was so.

I blinked. Perhaps she had been. Watching from somewhere. Watching from wherever little broken birds went when they died.

“Yeah,” Marshall said. “No official time of death yet, but it was weeks before Geoff disappeared.”

I was sick and dizzy hearing this. I remembered Coral telling me, Losing a child would be the worst thing. That’s what she’d decided, when she began to seek revenge. God help her, she’d truly known. The rehab had failed. Lexie had overdosed. The death of her only child was the thing that set Coral in motion.

“Holy shit,” Trey breathed. He picked up his glass and drained most of his drink.

The glass doors had not closed. That gold gleam shone. Now she was moving, emerging from the darkness into the fading sunlight.

Lexie. She was walking toward us. Marshall was wrong. He had to be wrong, because she was here. Lexie, lovely in an immaculate white dress that flowed around her slim, lithe body. Her smooth young face had no expression as she came, unhurried and businesslike, down the brick walk. She held a flat white clutch in front of her hips, clasped demurely. Her pale hair, tumbling in loose waves around her pretty face, gleamed in the setting sun.

Marshall was still talking. Trey was answering. Their words devolved into a mishmash. I closed my eyes. Marshall must be right; she was dead. I stared into a million colors swirling on the backs of my lids. Real Lexie, if alive, would be close to fifty, would look more like sixty. Marshall must be right.

I opened my eyes, and still she came. I glanced at the bar. Mills was saying something to his partner. They were drinking Cokes, alert, watching the perimeter. They did not seem to see anything amiss. She was not the danger they were looking for. Or perhaps only I could see her.