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Contents ( 39)
  1. Titles by Karen Rose
  2. CONTENTS
  3. PROLOGUE
  4. ONE
  5. TWO
  6. THREE
  7. FOUR
  8. FIVE
  9. SIX
  10. SEVEN
  11. EIGHT
  12. NINE
  13. TEN
  14. ELEVEN
  15. TWELVE
  16. THIRTEEN
  17. FOURTEEN
  18. FIFTEEN
  19. SIXTEEN
  20. SEVENTEEN
  21. EIGHTEEN
  22. NINETEEN
  23. TWENTY
  24. TWENTY-ONE
  25. TWENTY-TWO
  26. TWENTY-THREE
  27. TWENTY-FOUR
  28. TWENTY-FIVE
  29. TWENTY-SIX
  30. TWENTY-SEVEN
  31. TWENTY-EIGHT
  32. TWENTY-NINE
  33. THIRTY
  34. THIRTY-ONE
  35. THIRTY-TWO
  36. EPILOGUE
  37. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  38. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  39. What’s next on your reading list?

Wife.

It was too much, and Tom had to click away from their wedding photo. He wasn’t even sure why. Because she’d been married at all? Because she’d married someone else?

No, that wasn’t it. Tom was sure of that. Mostly sure.

It was, he decided, because she’d never told anyone. Or had she? Had she told Dana and Ethan Buchanan? She hadn’t at Christmas. She’d said so. But later?

Tom had a hard time believing that she had, because he hadn’t heard it through the family grapevine. Dana Buchanan was his mother’s best friend. If Dana knew, his mother knew.

If his mother knew, she would have sounded different when they’d spoken on the phone the evening before. At one time, back when they were hiding from his biological father, his mother had been the master of controlling her emotions. All these years later, not so much. Thirteen years of living with Max Hunter had given her the freedom to be herself without fear.

But Dana was cagey. She’d run a women’s shelter for years, protecting her clients’ secrets. Now she operated a halfway house for victims of sexual assault. She kept their secrets.

Maybe she’d kept Liza’s, too. Suddenly knowing if Liza had told her Chicago family was more important than anything else.

He glanced at the clock. It was seven thirty in Chicago. Dana would be awake. His fingers were typing out a text before he realized his own intention, but this wasn’t anyone else’s business. Only Liza’s. Not even mine. I don’t have the right.

Because he’d hurt her.

You didn’t feel the same way.

No. I didn’t.

I know.

He hadn’t been able to stop the words at that moment. Because he hadn’t felt that way, and letting her believe otherwise was cruel.

Except . . . that wasn’t entirely true. He had felt that way once. He’d almost told her on her eighteenth birthday, but she’d shocked him with the news that she was joining the army. He’d stopped himself that night, too stunned, too hurt to bare his soul.

Tom stared at his screen, at the photo of the man who’d been there when she’d needed someone. “I’m sorry you died,” he whispered to Fritz. “But I’m not sorry you saved her life. Thank you for that.”

Then he closed both the browser tab and the compartment in his heart. He had work to do.

He’d gotten into Sunnyside Oaks’s network and it was so easy, it was scary. He bet their system administrator believed he’d constructed a hackproof network. That admin would be wrong. A nurse working the night shift had clicked on a link he’d embedded in an e-mail to the staff in general with a bogus offer of free samples from a nonexistent pharmaceutical company.

He’d sent his message to two dozen different accounts, all with names he’d simply guessed at based on work he’d done with other medical facilities. One had worked.

Tom was violating the most basic of privacy laws at the moment, sifting through the facility’s patient database, looking for anyone who might be tied to Eden. So far, he’d found evidence of medical procedures done on movie stars and mob bosses, but nothing that resembled any of the Eden bigwigs. The facility hadn’t had a new arrival in more than five days.