But it was more than just Blake now. For whatever reason, he’d said in those letters to this woman something that incriminated me. And those words put everything in my life in jeopardy.

And the risk to everything I held dear made me willing to do something as crazy as going into a stranger’s home and removing something—stealing it, for all intents and purposes—just to preserve my family, my freedom, and my reputation. I’d spent the six years since college, every single day since the night of the accident, trying to leave it behind and create a life I could be proud of.

One Amanda and Henry could also be proud of.

I couldn’t risk any of that. And the option of going into a stranger’s house for a few minutes when she wasn’t home and grabbing a stack of letters that included the most incriminating one sounded pretty easy.

I checked the clock on my phone. Two minutes before ten. If I was going to do this thing, it was time.

I’d formulated a plan for how to pull the job off. I parked a block and a half away, at the end of a street so I wasn’t directly in front of anyone’s house. When I’d dressed at home, right after peeking in on a sleeping Henry and wishing I could trade places with him in blissful slumber, I’d selected a dark shirt and shorts, the better to blend into the night. I’d even pulled a baseball hat down low on my forehead, the band exerting a squeezing pressure against my scalp.

I checked myself in the rearview before I climbed out of the car.

The person I saw staring back at me looked exactly like someone going to break into a house, like a guy who didn’t want to be recognized. So I pushed the hat back a little on my forehead, hoping it made me look more casual and less like a creeping cat burglar.

I’d simply have to walk like a normal guy strolling through the neighborhood without a care in the world.

I turned the car off and got out.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The night was strangely quiet. The moon overhead slipped in and out of clouds like a moving spotlight. I instinctively reached for my phone, itching to capture and share the image, but I pushed the urge away. Instead, I simply stopped and made sure my phone was set to silent.

I tried to walk softly, but even with my sneakers, my footfalls sounded like gunshots in the quiet night. A few early-spring bugs chirped in the grass, and a car drove by a couple of blocks away, its engine emitting a low hum in the darkness, but otherwise there was almost no sound. No voices, no music. Nothing.

The silence unnerved me. The spring night seemed sinister, a cauldron of lurking dangers.