Chapters (51)
- Cover
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Acknowledgments
- P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
- About the Author
- About the Book
- Also by Alison Gaylin
- About the Publisher
Summer was still holding his hands. This was starting to feel like group therapy, and so she let go. Leaned back in her chair. “Quentin never knew, though,” Summer said. “He never knew about her running away.”
“She never told him?”
“No.”
“Wow.”
“Any idea where she may have gone for those few weeks?”
He nodded. “We had a second home,” he said. “A little cottage out east. We went there a lot when Katie was little, but maybe only once after Kimmy was born. After . . . what happened . . . Oh, I didn’t go out there for years. But once Katie left for good, I decided I should probably get it cleaned up so I could sell it. I found a whole bunch of Katie’s old clothes in there. Back from when she was fourteen years old.”
“So she was staying at your second home?”
He smiled a little. “Here I thought she was out on the streets somewhere. But she was at our place the whole time. She used to love going to that cottage when she was little. You wouldn’t think a little girl would be so crazy about the desert, but she was a strange kid.”
“The desert,” Summer said. “You said out east, I was picturing a cabin in Vermont.”
“Nah, it was driving distance,” he said. “Or I guess hitchhiking distance in Katie’s case. Little town on the Arizona border. Brittlebush it’s called.”
FOR SUMMER, LIFE so often seemed to move in loops. For instance, now. This drive. When Dean had called her with the news of Quentin’s death, she’d been on her way to Brittlebush, where she planned to see if she could track down information on Nicola Crane and Renee White, who had apparently lived there with a foster father by the name of Bill Grumley.
All that had been canceled, of course, along with the podcast. But a day and a half later, here she was, looping back, taking the same drive in search of the same information, the podcast alive again with possibility. She was wearing Quentin’s sunglasses, and she found herself talking to him in her mind, planning out questions as she drove, her arm resting against her open window, warm air blowing in, feeling more focused and tougher than she ever imagined she could feel. Looping back to her old self. Quentin at her side, or the spirit of him, anyway.