Oli rolls her eyes. ‘I said an open mind, not fantasy land.’

‘And then, ten years later, the guilt finally got to Nicole,’ Cooper continues dreamily. ‘She tried her best to make a new life for herself, but ultimately she just couldn’t get away from what she did. It ate her up inside until bang, she ended it all.’

Oli has a sudden thought: what if Alex tracked Nicole down somehow? What if she came to the house on Laker Drive and took Evie? Maybe that’s why Alex hasn’t called Cooper yet—she might be halfway across the country with a kid in tow.

But then the suicide wouldn’t make sense. Surely Nicole would stop at nothing to get her child back if someone took her. Oli considers a different possibility: maybe it was all too much for Nicole and she decided to end her life and take her daughter with her. She might be dead on the property somewhere.

Oli glances at her watch. ‘I need to file something soon.’ She scratches the side of her face—something is making her skin itch. She looks up at the trees accusingly.

Cooper is bouncing around as if he needs to piss. He cranes his neck back toward the main street. ‘There’s a cafe over there. We can grab a coffee, and you can write up your piece? I mean, I don’t really know how you usually work, but I’m happy to do whatever you want.’

Oli closes her eyes, trying to think. The trouble with this job is that there’s no roadmap telling you what to do next; there’s just deadline after deadline, and angry editors yelling and texting from the office.

She scans what she can see of the main street. Dawn’s intel suggests that the jogger spotted Nicole’s body early this morning, and from what Oli saw of her corpse, she hasn’t been dead longer than a day. Oli feels a surge of hope. If Nicole planned her suicide, there’s a chance she also made plans to protect her daughter. Perhaps she entrusted the little girl to someone she knew would look after her and keep things as normal as possible.

Oli rams the empty milk carton into the chip packet and starts back toward the car. She wants to believe the child is alive. ‘Come on!’ she yells over her shoulder.

‘Where are we going?’

‘To the school.’

‘School?’

‘Yep.’ She fires up the car, revs the engine, then activates the GPS app, which thankfully has decided to start working again. Once Cooper is in too, Oli reverses onto the road. Her heartbeat is racing ahead of her brain. ‘We need to find Nicole Horrowitz’s daughter.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER EIGHT