He heard the approaching tow truck and was backing out of the car when he saw the picture. It was on the floor on the passenger side, nearly up against the door, where it had slid when the car came to rest. Greg and Amanda, taken in front of this very car when he’d first brought it home to restore. Adam wasn’t sure how old she was in the photo, maybe twelve. He reached for it, knowing it was probably the most precious thing in the car, for her. And instead of putting it in the bag with the other loose things, he slipped it into his back pocket, where it would stay safer while he worked his way out of the crazily canted car.

Quinn was already talking to the driver of the truck, companionably, as if they knew each other. Maybe he’d towed Quinn’s car once or something. Or maybe it was just that everybody knew everybody around here.

Or maybe they’d crossed paths, like Deputy Lindholm, on one of their...cases.

“Friend of yours?” he asked as they got into his truck as the tow truck pulled away.

“We helped him with something a couple of years ago.”

“‘Something’?”

Quinn gave a half shrug. “His son got caught up in something, a financial deal that went bad. It wasn’t his fault, he was set up, but he couldn’t prove it.” Quinn smiled then. “We did.”

“That’s...what you do?”

“We help people in the right who have exhausted all options and have no other recourse. Or as my wife puts it, we’re all about righteous lost causes.”

And what about lost causes in the wrong?

Adam unclenched his jaw as he reached for the ignition.

There was no help for those. And who knew that better than he?

Chapter 11

“I can’t believe I crashed his car,” Amanda said, feeling cold and shivery inside as she sat down on the couch in the Foxworths’ living room. This had been, she knew, Hayley’s parents’ house, although she and Quinn had made some changes together, fairly major ones, to make it theirs.

“From the looks of things,” Hayley said, “you didn’t. You were hit. Hardly the same thing.”

“If I’d seen that guy sooner—”

“If you figure out how you could have done that, you let me know, because I sure can’t.”

Cutter came to sit at her feet, resting his chin on her leg, looking up at her with obvious concern. Amanda stroked his fur, feeling a bit calmer as she looked at the woman sitting across the coffee table from her, the wife of the man she admired beyond most in her life now. Quinn hadn’t even met Hayley yet when his life had collided so uglily with her father’s five years ago. But now Amanda couldn’t picture the tough ex-soldier without this woman by his side.