At ten o’ clock the following morning Winnie was sitting at her desk at work, checking emails and making a grocery list. Her kid was eating them out of house and home. She missed the days when he was little and they shared meals at his little Paw Patrol table; with the way their schedules were now, they hardly ate dinner together anymore. She was only required to be in the office three days a week, and she used that time to catch up on paperwork. The other two days she spent in the field, mostly in psychiatric wards to place patients in home care. She preferred this job to the one she’d had at Illuminations. She didn’t have to work with the patients herself, for one thing, not after the initial placement; after that, they belonged to their case workers. It was more of an overseer’s position and that suited her well, she thought. She got much too involved with her patients. That’s why Nigel had wanted her to find something different after Illuminations. Winnie reached for her coffee and found it cold. She was working to get a patient placement in one of the more coveted adult homes, but her mind kept drifting to the name of the little girl, Lisa Sharpe. Why had Nigel searched for missing children on the internet and then written their names down? It felt like the deepest betrayal, the cruelest thing he could do after…and yet hadn’t she done the same thing? Scouring the news for stories of missing children? If she were to be honest with herself, she would admit that it was the parents she was most interested in. She wanted to see their hurt, to experience their pain alongside them like she had some part in it. She got off on the hurting. She got up from her desk, abruptly leaving her office to look for fresh coffee. That’s what she needed; she hadn’t had enough today and her mind was fritzing. She laughed a little as she made her way down the hall and back toward the kitchen. It was the type of laugh a woman made when she was uncomfortable with something, and Winnie was uncomfortable with her thoughts. She’d never say any of it out loud, no way. She was pouring coffee into one of the company mugs when her next thought derailed her so thoroughly she forgot to add her usual cream and sugar. She stared down at her mug of black coffee once she was back in her office and thought, I can’t do this. I can’t pretend nothing is wrong when it is. She needed to talk to Nigel, face-to-face. Tell him that she knew that he’d been looking at…things on the internet. She grabbed her jacket from the back of her chair, relieved at her own decisiveness. But she always had been the confrontational one; she just had to work her way up to it. Nigel, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with the battle; he wanted to win like everyone else, but he had other ways of doing it. Winnie didn’t want that type of fight in her marriage. What she really wanted was to turn back time, go back to the night she’d made the worst mistake of her life, take it all back like it never happened. If she could take that one moment back…her marriage, her son…everything would be healthy as it should be.