“I’ve gotta go,” I whispered, stepping away from the table.

Martha’s hand still on me tightened. “No, honey.”

I pulled carefully free and took another step back as I felt all their eyes soft on me.

“I’ve gotta go,” I repeated.

“Not thinkin’ that’s a good idea, hon,” Elvira said gently.

I looked to Martha and whispered, “I’ll call you later.”

“Tess, honey—” she started to whisper back but I turned and hightailed it through the door.

I caught Ada and told her I had a headache.

Then I grabbed my purse and went out to my car.

I hoped Elvira, Gwen, Camille, or Tracy would drop Martha at my place to pick up her car.

And I stupid, stupid, stupidly stopped by the store and bought a six-pack of Bud in bottles, Brock’s preference, on the way home.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Light of a Warm, Sunny Day

I STARED AT myself in the mirror of my bathroom.

I now did this a lot. Ever since I came back from the police station after catching sight of myself in the one-way mirror, I did it. Looking at myself for the first time… no… actually examining myself for the first time in my whole life.

Martha was a little right but mostly she was wrong.

The last three months hadn’t been about building a Tessa O’Hara who, if Jake slash Brock saw her again, he would think, “Whoa, shit, I fucked up screwing over that.”

It had been about finding out who I was.

No, not even that.

It had been about not being who I was becoming.

The day after I got interrogated by a member of a multiagency task force regarding my ex-husband’s criminal exploits, I looked in the mirror, examined myself, and came to the uneasy knowledge that I had no fucking clue who I was, no clue where I was going, and no clue who I wanted to be.

The only thing I knew, looking in the mirror that day and all the days since, was that I knew I didn’t want to be me.

So I was trying a new me on for size.

In all this examining, I knew I’d been doing this unconsciously for a while, drifting through life just as Martha said, with my head in the sand. But along the way I was apathetically trying on new versions of me. I wasn’t paying a lick of attention, so unlike other women, sometime in my late twenties or my thirties, I did not find the me that fit.

I liked decorating cakes. I got off on the fact people thought they were beautiful and loved to eat them. I was really proud of my bakery, how it looked, how inviting it was inside and the fact I could do something I loved and make a decent living with it.

But that was as far as I’d gotten.