“What are you planning to do?”

“I’m not going to do anything.”

I stare at him, my heart pounding. “I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t think there’s anything I can do about that.”

A little voice of reason tells me to go upstairs, take a shower, and go to bed. Let it go. But I’m angry with him. Worse, I’m scared. I’m terrified he’s going to do something that will jeopardize this precious thing we’ve built.

“I can’t compete with them.” In the periphery of my consciousness, I hear myself say the words, hating them the instant they’re out because they sound jealous and shallow and petty, three things I’ve never been.

The air around me feels fragile, like if I move, something will shatter and I’ll never be able to pick up the pieces. For an instant, I’m frozen in place, undecided, unable to breathe.

But I can’t stay. Not like this. Rising, I snag my coat and keys and then head for the door.

“Kate.”

I open the door. His voice follows me into the night, but he doesn’t come after me.

CHAPTER 12

She dreamed of that night. Even after all this time, and so many years spent trying to forget, it was as vivid as if it had happened yesterday. The absolute dark of an Amish farm. A drug-fueled plot that had gone horribly wrong. The spill of innocent blood. It was a night in which a series of bad decisions had led to more bad decisions and culminated in a nightmare. People she thought she’d known turned into strangers she wished she’d never met.

Six people had died because of them. An Amish mother and father. Four innocent children. A teenaged boy had been left alone, to fend for himself. But those weren’t the only tragedies that night. Four other lives had been irrevocably changed. Promising young lives wrecked by unfathomable guilt and secrets they would have to live with forever.

Those secrets had destroyed her life, stolen her innocence, and any semblance of happiness or hope for the future. In the weeks that followed, she’d even found herself questioning whether she wanted to remain on this earth. But somehow she’d gotten through those dark days. She’d graduated from high school. Gone to college. Gotten married and had children. After the divorce and with the kids grown, she’d thrown herself into her art and opened the gallery. Through it all, Jules had never found happiness. She knew something about herself she couldn’t live with. It was like living with a person you hated—someone you could never trust nor leave.

Murderer.

Jules woke with a start, the word a whisper in her ear, her heart pounding, her body slicked with sweat. Sitting up, she threw her legs over the side of the bed and put her face in her hands. “Damn you,” she muttered, not exactly sure whom she was cursing. Herself. Or maybe the others.

She grabbed her robe off the foot of the bed and worked it over her shoulders as she padded to the kitchen. Like so many nights before, she went to the refrigerator for the bottle of chardonnay she kept in the door for such occasions. Mild annoyance rippled through her when the fridge light didn’t come on, but she knew by heart where to find the bottle. The wine didn’t kill the pain; nothing could do that. But it would get her through the night.