I nod, and he grabs my arm and leads me to his truck. I’m numb, shaking from the cold and wet and shock. I let him pack me into the passenger’s seat of his truck, then sit there in the stuffy air while he jogs around the front to his side, his big body lighting up in the headlights like a firefly. The cab is thick with the smell of roasted chicken coming from the grocery bags by my feet, heavy brown paper with the gourmet market’s logo. It clings to my lungs and coats the windows in a milky fog, turning the woods and road hazy.

Or maybe that’s just my tears.

The cell phone buzzes in my hand. Paul, probably wondering where I am. I hit Ignore, and my cell goes dim, then black.

Micah climbs in, cleaning his glasses with a bandanna he pulls from the seat pocket. “Look, maybe you should...I don’t know...call him back and talk this out.”

“What’s there to talk about? Paul lied to me about Pitts Cove. He fed me some bullshit story about Walsh Capital and a plan he hatched with the mayor, but I’m no idiot. Swampland is not an investment.”

“No,” Micah murmurs. “It’s not.” He slides his glasses up his nose and cranks the engine. The radio kicks on, a country music station, as does the heat. He fiddles with the controls, flips on the defogger.

“And why is Paul always out for a run when women get sucked into the lake? What is up with that? It’s so awfully damn convenient, don’t you think? Especially since Billy Barnes doesn’t remember seeing him on Wednesday morning. Paul doesn’t have an alibi for the morning yet another woman washes up under his dock. Even Jax said as much. He said, ‘That’s two.’ He told me to watch my back, and I thought it was just Jax being batty.”

“Look, it might be nothing.”

“If you believed that, you would have just said it was nothing.”

Micah doesn’t respond, and his silence is answer enough. I turn to the window, feeling sick.

“What am I going to do? I don’t have anywhere to go. I don’t have a job. Knocked up with a baby I didn’t plan and don’t have the money to care for, not on my own.” I rake my fingers into the soaked hair at my temples, squeezing with the heels of my hands. “I am married to a criminal. I am having a criminal’s baby. Oh, God, I really am my mother.”

My cell lights up on my lap with another call from Paul. I hit Ignore, then pull up his contact card and tap Block. I don’t ever want to talk to him again.