“The thing is,” Hannah says, “no one’s actually after you. The police found you before and couldn’t make the charges stick. You’re not actually a wanted man.”

I look into her deep brown eyes and am struck again by how pretty she is.

“It’s not the police I’m running from, Hannah.”

Her expression seems to change as she thinks about what I might be suggesting.

We’re silent for a moment. I stare out at the water. When I was a kid growing up in San Francisco, my parents would bring me here each summer, and I fell in love with the brilliant blue water, the pine forests, the frosted mountain peaks. When I was pulling jobs with Marco, I thought about Lake Tahoe often, wondering if I could be a different person here. Step back in time and try to be the person I could have become, instead of the one I did.

“Last week,” I say, “I asked you if you’d ever refrain from putting something in the paper you thought was newsworthy.” Hannah nods.

“Well,” I say, “I’m going to tell you everything. Throw myself on your sword. You have to decide what to do with it.”

She waits.

“I’m a thief, Hannah. Or I was. All those crimes I’m suspected of, I did them. My partner was a pretty bad guy named Marco. When I told him I was quitting, he tried to kill me. If he ever finds out where I am, he’ll come for me. He’ll cut my throat and pull my tongue out through the hole.”

Hannah swallows.

“I came to Lake Tahoe to start over,” I continue. “I don’t want to be the person I was. I never killed anyone, Hannah. I was never that kind of criminal. But I stole from people. I hurt people. I don’t like who I was.”

It feels good, in a way, to get this information off my chest. I’ve been pretending for so long, it’s nice to finally tell the truth to someone.

After a moment of silence, Hannah says, “So the story about the trust fund? That was all bullshit?”

I laugh. “Total bullshit.” I’m not sure how much to tell her, but I’ve already started so I decide to see it through all the way. “I’ve got a stash of ‘particularly valuable diamonds’ hidden at Lake Aloha,” I say, making quotation marks with my fingers. “I go up there a couple times a year to grab a few stones that I can sell and live off of.”

Hannah seems mortified at the thought that the day we met, the day I saved a little girl’s life, I was on a mission to retrieve stolen jewels.