Anyone looking for the painting (and people had been looking for it for nearly thirty years) would be dragging the electronic net for anyone else who might be searching for it. They would all be her enemies. Jail or worse, depending on who found her first.

She’d tried letting it all go as the months wound out, click by click on the computer, her friends and loved ones and the hope of ever righting this wrong fading from the forefront of her thoughts. After four years, the heat of wanting it was all but lost at the vanishing point. She’d acclimated to a shortened focus, to days made of helping June through fits of oddly happy, if uncooperative, dementia. Emma’s nights were spent drawing and drinking and cyberstalking her people.

And now a reset. Revenge was her heartbeat again. The painting was right there on that flat, cold screen, but also very much on a nail on a wall in a house somewhere.

Emma was unsurprised by the jolt coursing through her, and at the wild urge to grab a few things to add to her duffel in the trunk of her car. She wasn’t even shocked by the sudden satisfied rage, the mental image flaring back into her mind’s eye after all this time, the ugly but good daydream: Jonathan bleeding out and her just letting him.

But what did knock her sideways and press a howl out through her gritted teeth was the fear of that hope, of failing and of having to let it all go again, and the sudden wish that she’d never seen the video at all.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Waiting suited Roy. He kind of liked it. Other people got upset over their minutes ticking off into the air, or draining away into the floor under their feet, or soaked up into the pavement under their slow-rolling wheels. The chance to get ahead of their to-do lists dried up, and it meant a lot more to most people than it did to Roy. He never minded the blameless moments that trickled out in between the things he should be doing. He found them peaceful.

Waiting in traffic wasn’t too bad. Or on line for a lottery ticket, or in this case just passing an hour in his truck with his eye on the corner where John would be turning into sight.

He didn’t ever count time spent waiting. It was the easiest time of all. In delays that couldn’t be blamed on him, he could disappear without trying. And hiding from the world was practically his part-time job. It was better not to be seen at all than to be seen screwing up. It was self-preservation.

He craned to look farther down the road, between the buildings, watching for the flash of John’s red car.