Despite the phantom voyeur and the nervous dog.

No one would ever know.

She almost smiled.

She’d go home, have a hot bath, maybe a glass of wine, and pretend she had never been inside all by herself, never lain on his sheets in his bed in his room, had never taken his gun and . . .

The gun!

Why didn’t she feel its weight in her hoodie?

Oh, no, no, no . . . She reached into her pocket, found the key to James’s house and her phone, but the pistol . . . ?

Her anxiety cranked up three notches.

Forcing herself, she double-checked every pocket.

Nothing.

The Glock was definitely missing.

She went cold inside.

Hadn’t she picked it up? Or had she dropped it when she missed the last step on the stairs?

Let it go. Just get out of here. It’s his gun anyway.

Hurrying to her car, she told herself that James might just think he’d misplaced it and she and Sophia had found it and left it. She’d explain to Sophia that she’d run back in and put it . . .

Are you nuts? That nasty, nagging voice in her head cut into her thoughts. The police searched for the gun, too. And now it has your prints all over it. How’re you going to explain that one?

She couldn’t.

She slid behind the wheel and glanced in her rearview mirror.

Round haunted eyes stared back at her.

As she started the car, the voice in her head wouldn’t shut up.

“Face it, Willow,” it taunted. “You’re screwed.”

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 33

Sophia snapped her hair into a quick bun and glowered at her reflection in the bathroom mirror.

James was slipping away.

She didn’t understand it.

But she sensed it. Like sand sifting beneath her feet in an outgoing tide, James Cahill was leaving her.

Angrily, she turned on the shower. She’d thought, stupidly, that his interest in her had begun to wane when Megan went missing, that some sense of guilt was drawing him away, but that wasn’t quite right. Nope. That wasn’t it. The real shift in his feelings had come when Rebecca had come sailing back into his life.

To find her sister.

Oh, right.

Like she even cared about Megan.

What a joke!

Wasn’t it bad enough that she had to deal with one sister turning James’s head, but a second? That just wasn’t fair!