She thought about letting them know what Morasco had said, but decided not to bother. Mom would find out soon enough that Quentin Garrison probably hadn’t shot her and Dad and hadn’t shot himself unless he’d been forced. “Just thinking out loud,” Robin said, giving them both a smile, Nicola’s much smaller than the one she gave her mother. “I’ve got to head out. I’m needed at work.”

Once she got in her car, she called Eric—not because she was dying to talk to him, but because she had no one else to say it to who might even begin to understand. “I’m suspicious of Nicola.”

“Your mom’s friend? That’s crazy.”

You wouldn’t think it was crazy if you knew that she investigated you.

“Think about it, Eric,” she said. “Someone got my mom’s gun away from her, but they shot my dad first, not her. My dad’s wounds were almost instantly fatal. My mom was shot once in the abdomen. Now she’s fine.”

“You think she made sure your mom would survive her injuries. That she only shot her . . . why? To keep her from protecting your dad?”

“Why not?”

“Okay,” he said slowly. “But why would your mother’s old friend walk into her house and kill her husband?”

“I’m thinking my mom might be remembering things wrong. I’m thinking it might have been Nicola who had the argument with Dad.”

“Why?”

“It turns out Nicola was the one who got my mother the gun. Who taught her how to shoot. She’s an expert shooter. I’ve looked at old pictures of her, and beneath those muscles and that tan and that gray hair . . . Nicola could be the associate of mom’s Quentin Garrison was talking about. Mom’s dear friend Nikki could be April Cooper.”

There was a long stretch of silence on the other end of the line. And then, “I don’t understand.”

“You should.”

“What? Why?”

“Because, Eric,” she said. “You know what it’s like to have secrets.”

Robin thought about her mother, all the things she never knew about her that she’d only just learned in the past few days: She had fought off an attacker. She owned a gun. She’d hired a PI to investigate Robin’s husband. Her closest friend may have been a mass murderer in the ’70s. She was a woman with important movie tokens and sexy teenage Polaroids, a past she never spoke about, and many, many secrets.

As she reached her stop, Robin remembered what Nicola had said about Renee. Your mother loves you. She would do anything for you. Isn’t that what’s important?

It was important. Of course, it was. But it wasn’t everything. There was also the truth.

Thirty-Nine

Summer