He untangled her arms and slid her off him to one side. “You can’t keep coming in here like this.”

“Why not?” She looked at him with luminous and slightly wounded eyes.

“A million reasons,” he said.

“You worry too much.”

“You don’t worry enough.”

She snuggled close, her head against his shoulder. “Hold me,” she whispered breathlessly. “Oh, James, just hold me for a little while . . .”

He lay quietly and stared at the ceiling, remembering the yawning chasm of his dream.

* * *

Willow waited in the shadows.

As she always seemed to do.

The hotel was quiet in the predawn hours while most of the guests were sleeping. The few people on staff were at their posts, one receptionist in the office behind the lobby, probably looking at porn on his phone, the lone person on janitorial staff locked in his small room in the basement.

The doors of the rooms were closed, locked for the night, the hallways hushed.

She was alone, and she knew where the cameras were.

On the third floor, she stared at the door of the executive suite, where James Cahill was now recovering and where, she knew, Sophia Russo had made her way inside. Willow thought about creeping closer to the door, even using her passkey to crack it open, but there was the dog, who would put up a ruckus if a stranger entered, and James was probably not sleeping anyway.

She imagined what was going on in that room. Despite his injuries, despite his recent hospital stay, despite the fact that his supposed girlfriend had gone missing, James was fornicating.

With Sophia.

A sin that couldn’t be forgotten and certainly not forgiven.

* * *

Fourteen hours on the road.

Charity had to give it up for the night.

She’d considered staying with her aunt, but thought better of it.

Too many questions that she didn’t want to answer.

Instead, she pulled into the parking lot of a no-tell motel just outside of Oakland and rented a room just as dawn was breaking and the heavyset woman in the small reception area was refilling the coffee pots. The receptionist looked like she could use a shot of caffeine herself, as she kept yawning while she worked, straightening the baskets of fake sugar and fake cream nestled by a row of paper cups, one filled with stir sticks. “Just a sec,” she called over her shoulder as Charity, overnight bag in hand, waited at a laminate faux-wood-grained counter.

The receptionist finished her job and said, “What can I do ya for?” in that folksy manner that irked Charity. She wondered if she should have called her aunt after all and suffered through all of the nosy, busybody questions she’d have to have answered as Aunt Maureen grilled her. “Why aren’t you married?” “Don’t you want children?” “Really, a job as an investigative reporter? In the middle of nowhere? Are you kidding me?”