It hit her now just how little she had really known about the man she’d thought she was closer to than anyone else in the world. She hadn’t known his real name. Or where he grew up. Where he went to high school. Who his friends were. And she had known nothing about the woman he had supposedly loved. The woman who had given birth to her.

Above all else, Jessica had no idea if Tony Shaw was capable of cold-blooded murder.

She left the restroom, and then the bar, in a daze. She heard Hank Stevenson yell something about a drink, and Razor ask if she was okay, but Jessica felt like she was deep underwater and their muffled voices were drifting down from the surface.

Then she was running along York. Sweat dampened her hairline and the back of her neck. Her chest ached, and her breath came in ragged bursts. The photo in her pocket felt heavy and accusatory, like a lipstick stolen from a drugstore. When she reached the Blue Moon Inn, Jessica doubled over, hands on her thighs, trying to catch her breath.

Her truck was still parked next to the neon sign. Jessica couldn’t face her tiny, claustrophobic motel room, so she dropped the Silverado’s tailgate and used it as a makeshift step to clamber onto the truck bed’s hard tonneau cover.

She lay down flat on her back, her chest heaving. Above her, the sky had deepened to shades of lilac and heather that she might have found beautiful on any other night. But not this night. She pulled the pack of Marlboro Lights and lighter from her bag and lit a cigarette. The gray-white wisps of smoke briefly obscured the perfect sunset before evaporating.

The first time Jessica had heard Rob Young’s name and had been made aware of his possible involvement in the murder of Eleanor Lavelle and the abduction of her daughter, a thought had ignited somewhere in the dark recesses of her brain. Like a flare being fired into the night from a boat stranded in the middle of the ocean. The trails had lingered in the depths of her subconscious until finally being snuffed out by the absence of Rob Young’s name, or her father’s photo, in Jason Pryce’s high school yearbook.

She flicked the butt over the side of the truck and watched the orange glow of the tip arc through the air before disappearing from view. She lit another cigarette. Jessica used to be the kind of girl who would have the occasional smoke when she’d had a few drinks at a party. After Tony died, it had become twenty a day. Same with the drinking and the tattoos. Everything to excess.