She went on, “I thought, at first, that she’d gotten over her anger and maybe she’d turned around, you two made up, and she just forgot to keep me in the loop.” She looked out the window to where snow was still falling. “I didn’t even worry all that much when she didn’t answer her phone or respond to my texts. I thought she probably felt foolish and didn’t want to explain anything, but when she hadn’t responded by . . . God, what was it? Friday night, I guess? I began to worry and started calling around to her friends and coworkers, who told me she hadn’t shown up for work. One of them . . . Ramon . . . tried to contact her too. Even went to her apartment and called me to report that she wasn’t there and her car was missing. So I started checking with everyone I could think of, anyone she mentioned that I could find and, of course, the hospitals.”

“And nothing.”

“So here we are.”

“Leaving you to think I had something to do with it.”

“Obviously, her story about the fight was right.”

“And it makes sense to you that I was injured badly enough to be taken by ambulance to a hospital where I was in a coma but still had a way of getting rid of your sister?”

“I’m thinking you could have . . . an accomplice,” she said. “Megan told me you were seeing someone else.”

“So instead of breaking it off with her, I staged an entire fight and hired someone to kidnap her? Seriously, Rebecca?” He walked into the dining room and, wincing a little, knelt near a cabinet with a door hanging open. “Shit,” he said upon looking inside, then retrieved a dusty bottle of some kind of liquor. He held it up. “Drink?”

“No, thank you.”

He scrounged in another cupboard and returned with a couple of glasses, along with the bottle. “Sure?”

“I don’t want a drink.” She’d had drinks with him before . . . and that hadn’t turned out the way it should’ve. “This is serious, James.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

“And, coming out of the hospital, being on painkillers and all, I don’t think you’re supposed to drink either.”

He nodded curtly. “Agreed. But then . . . it’s been a helluva couple days, don’t you think?” He set the glasses on a small table that hadn’t been upended in the police search, poured them each a healthy shot, and left the open bottle between them.

“Maybe you should be more careful,” she suggested.

“No ‘maybe’ about it. But to hell with it.” He tossed back the first drink. “And you want to know why? Everyone in this damned town, including you, seems to think I’m, at the very least, a kidnapper and, at the worst . . . God, I don’t want to think.” He poured himself another shot.

“Wow. Slow down.”