He held up his Heineken. "I don't know what to toast."

"How about to not dying?"

He shrugged and tapped his can against her glass. "To not dying."

They sat quietly, sipping their beverages, staring at the peeling off-white paint behind the dresser.

"There was a man I treated, before I stopped practicing," Sheila said, finally breaking the silence. "His wife committed suicide. She'd been having paranoid delusions, terrifying hallucinations. She'd wake in the middle of the night screaming. He was worried she'd harm herself, or their daughter. He convinced a colleague of mine to prescribe her medication for schizophrenia, even though she'd never been formally diagnosed."

"Okay," Martin said, unsure where she was going with this.

"A few months later she overdosed on those same pills. Her daughter found her. He blamed himself for her death. But it wasn't his fault."

"Oh, we're doing this."

She gave him a sympathetic look. "You think you could have prevented it. But she insinuated herself into your life, Martin. You said so yourself. She knew the risks. Hell, Martin, she stole your keycard. For all you know, she could have let him in—"

"Sheila, I appreciate what you're trying to do, I do, but I don't want to talk about this right now."

She nodded. Sipped her drink. Martin finished his beer and crushed the can. He returned to the minibar, got himself a bottle of tequila and twisted off the lid.

"So when was the last time you've been back home?" she asked as he sat back down beside the bed, eagerly changing the subject. "You never told me you lived in Rhode Island."

"I only lived there until I was five. We moved to Connecticut shortly after they took Ruby away."

"Your mother."

He nodded. It was difficult to admit, having never really had a mother for most of his life, at least not in the parental sense. But Ruby Savage was his mother. Though they looked and acted nothing alike, they'd shared a home for the first five years of his life. They shared the same name.

Ruby Savage was his mother and Barrows Bay was his home.

"You never did tell me what happened there."

"I will."

"When you're ready," she said.

"Uh-huh. But I haven't been back to Barrows Bay since we left. A part of me is scared to, I guess."

"Scared?"

He nodded. "The last time I was there, someone tried to kill me."

"What? Martin, you were five years old. Why would someone want to kill a—?"

She stopped short of saying "kill a child," realizing her error. They both knew someone intimately who murdered children as a hobby. They were on the run from him right now.

"We left town because Aunt Norma didn't feel safe there anymore. Not after Ruby left. After the fire."

"Fire?"

"Our house. Some people called it the Gingerbread House. It was winter. I remember being so cold, standing in the street in boots and pajamas watching my house burn down, huddled under Norma's big winter jacket."