The mountain roads were as serpentine as she remembered when Avery meandered through the final leg of the journey. She slowed when she made the last turn. The road in front of her, which at its conclusion led to the cabin’s driveway, was speckled with the morning sun and shadowed by the foliage of the forest around her. She drove to the end of the street and stopped. In front of her was the quaint, A-frame cabin sided with cedar and perched at the precipice of a hill that dropped off to the lake behind it. The driveway was unpaved, and the gravel was packed down in two ruts with a shallow mound of rocks between them. She saw a car parked at the end of the drive. She didn’t recognize it. The mailbox, however, held the numbers of the cabin’s address. When she came here as a child the three sevens were bright red and vibrant. Today they were ruddy and weatherworn.

There was motion inside the house. A figure passed in front of the window and appeared to pause for a moment. Avery noticed the curtains flutter and she imagined him peering carefully around the window’s edge at the fire-red Range Rover stopped in the middle of the street. She almost pulled into the driveway. She almost parked behind the car and climbed the front steps to knock on the door. Almost. Instead, she turned right and pulled away. Speaking directly with her father had never been part of the plan. It couldn’t be. But she had to come. She had to see the cabin again. She had to make sure. Confirmation was most definitely part of her plan. The rest, Avery could only hope would work. She pulled a U-turn in the cul-de-sac and started her drive back to the city.

* * *

Walt Jenkins drove his unmarked government SUV, the keys to which Jim Oliver had handed him on his first night back in New York. He nearly pulled down Stonybrook Circle after he had seen Avery’s red Range Rover make the turn. Instincts, however, told him not to. It was a good thing. After he spotted her vehicle stopped in the middle of the road in front of a gravel drive, she had turned around and come back his way. The winding, empty mountain roads did not make the best environment to tail someone.

He watched her turn and head back toward the city. Walt was happy to give her a bit of room. He turned onto Stonybrook Circle now and stopped in the same spot Avery’s Range Rover had been a moment before. There was only a single, isolated home on this short stretch of road.