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
She didn’t repeat herself. She’d said it perfectly clearly, and he’d heard her. That was obvious. She could see him stalling for time, his brain working behind those clear eyes, clicking through responses. At last, Eric opened his mouth, but she put a finger to his lips. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
“But I was just—”
“I mean it, Eric. I shouldn’t have asked. I don’t want to know. Not today.”
He nodded, slowly. They got into the limo together, neither one of them saying a word. As they headed out of the parking lot, Robin told herself, the way her father would have told her, that everything was fine. That Eric was probably just texting a work colleague about an important matter and even if he wasn’t, that was something to save discussing for another time, when there wasn’t so much going on.
Robin found herself remembering instead what Mr. Dougherty had told her the night of the shooting, about seeing a strange car near her parents’ home. She scanned the parking lot for silver sedans, because that was something concrete and simple to do with her brain. There were many silver sedans in the lot. Next to one of them, she spotted silver-haired, bright-eyed Nikki talking to a tall, young bespectacled man in a dark T-shirt and jeans, who looked . . . Could it be? Her gaze went to the Chevy insignia on the back of the car, the name of the make. Chevrolet Cruze.
It could have been important. Or not. During the hours she’d spent in the waiting room at St. Catherine’s the night of the shooting, Robin had looked up Chevy Cruze on her phone. Turned out it was the most popular car at East Coast rental agencies by more than 30 percent. If you rented a car to come to the funeral, odds were you’d get a Cruze.
More interesting than the model and make of the car was the young man Nikki had been speaking to and how, in the midst of their rather animated conversation, he’d raised his head and watched the limo as it left the parking lot, his gaze intent, as though he were trying to see inside. Robin pulled her phone out of her bag. Looked up images of Quentin Garrison. Sure enough, his headshot from the NPR station came up first, and Robin saw him staring back at her—the young man from the parking lot. Her mother’s old friend Nikki was talking to Quentin Garrison. About what, she had no idea. But Robin wanted to know.