“You’re asking for too much. Far too much. I can’t come up with that much money on such short notice. I have a family. And we just . . .” It sounded silly to mention it in contrast to her lost and injured sisters. But I said it anyway. “We’re having work done on our house this spring. I put down a deposit. That was a lot of what we had saved.”

Dawn gave me a stare as cold as ice. She used her left fist and rapped on the hood of the car twice. “Cry me a river. I think you’ll find a way. I don’t believe you have a choice. Ten thousand. Thirty days.”

She drove off, leaving me sitting in the road as the sun came up. Just like that—I had a blackmailer.

I thought back to that article, the one in which Dawn’s mother had called me an angel.

—

Everything I’m about to tell you proves how wrong she was. . . .

CHAPTER ONE

“Ryan.”

Someone called my name. I was leaving the Juniper Pig and stepping into the parking lot, heading for my car. The voice that came through the dark was sharp and husky, a knife swipe through the night, and I jumped.

I couldn’t tell if a man or a woman had spoken.

After work I’d stopped by the Pig, the microbrewery I’d owned a small stake in for the last sixteen months. I was one of three partners, and my contribution had been the smallest, but we took turns going by in the evenings to see how things were running. And that night was my turn.

I hadn’t wanted to stop by the bar. Amanda was waiting at home with our baby, Henry, and thinking of seeing them made my stomach flutter with anticipation and joy. My time away from them felt longer than the hours that passed on the clock, and returning to them every evening was sweet relief. Since Henry had been born, I’d been trying hard to curb my tendency to overwork. But it wasn’t easy. Since my dad died while I was in college, leaving my mother and me high and dry, I’d been compelled to keep going forward, to keep pushing at work. . . .

I hoped Henry would change that. I hoped I could slow down.

But a shadowy figure came toward me in the darkness, freezing my progress. The person was short, the face in shadow.

It was early April, the air still cool, the days still lengthening. I waited, watching. I’d just posted to my Instagram account, sharing a photo of the beer I’d just sampled, one of our brewers’ latest concoctions, the HopPig IPA.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“Ryan?”