Christy-Lynn stood looking at him. If he was hoping for a laugh, he had sadly misjudged his audience. He’d struck too close to the bone, and they both knew it. “I think it’s best if we just keep our distance,” she threw over her shoulder as she crossed to the front door. She had said her piece. She just wanted to leave and forget the conversation ever happened. If that meant she was hiding, so be it.

Wade watched the Range Rover’s taillights fade from sight. He’d certainly mucked that up, managing to turn an apology into a confrontation because he couldn’t keep his opinion to himself. But it was she who had opened the door; all he did was walk through it. And in spite of their history, which amounted to exactly one alcohol-induced dissertation on the shortcomings of her husband, he really had wanted to help.

She was in a bad place, questioning her worth as a wife and a woman, blaming herself for things that weren’t even close to being her fault. Because she’d made the mistake of getting mixed up with a bastard. Was it possible to be married to Stephen Ludlow and not know who he was underneath? One thing was certain—he’d left his footprints all over Christy-Lynn.

Behind all the icy stares and prickly responses, she was glaringly fragile, like a broken bit of china that had been haphazardly mended. One careless move and she would shatter. Not that all those fissures were necessarily her husband’s doing. It was possible that she’d earned them long before meeting Stephen, and that he had merely capitalized on them, sensing an easy mark and then moving in. In fact, the longer he thought about it, the more convinced he was that that was precisely how it had gone down. Not that it mattered. She’d made it crystal clear that their truce—all twelve minutes of it—was over.

Wade’s question continued to fester as Christy-Lynn drove home. Could he be right? Did she really not want answers? The accusation rankled. Not because he had no right to make it, but because part of her knew he was right.

It had been months since she checked in with Connelly. Yes, she’d been focused on the store, busy with the renovations, but with the opening finally behind her, would she resume her quest for answers? And what did any of it matter really? Stephen was gone, and she had started a new life. Even the media had moved on. Why shouldn’t she do the same?

Maybe Wade’s theory was right. Maybe the affair hadn’t been about her at all, but about Stephen’s enormous ego and his sense of entitlement. But what if he was wrong? What if it was something else, something missing in her that had actually driven her husband into another woman’s arms? The thought should appall her—and did. To buy into the fiction that she was somehow responsible for her husband’s infidelity was an affront to betrayed women everywhere. And yet there it was, the pebble in her shoe demanding at long last to be dealt with.

Her thoughts were still churning as she pulled the Rover into her driveway and cut the engine. After the events of the day, it was a relief to turn the key and step through the door of the 1920s bungalow she now called home. It wasn’t grand, but then she hadn’t wanted it to be. In fact, it was rather shabby, the rooms still crowded with Carol’s furniture and knickknacks, the bath and kitchen sadly dated. There simply hadn’t been room in her brain to tackle renovating the shop and the house simultaneously. Now, with the opening behind her, she could finally start thinking about making the bungalow a home.

Just not tonight.

At some point during the drive home, her head had begun to throb. The opening had exceeded her wildest hopes, and she had managed to smooth things over with Missy and Dar, and yet she couldn’t shake the niggling suspicion that Wade Pierce wasn’t through complicating her life. But she’d have to think about that tomorrow. At the moment, she didn’t have the energy to do more than swallow two ibuprofen, peel out of her clothes, and fall into bed. She sighed as she slid between the sheets and clicked off the bedside lamp, her limbs suddenly leaden as she drifted toward a strange and watery dreamscape.

The water is icy, a million needles prickling at her skin. And murky. Like tea or dirty dishwater. There is a light in the distance—no, a pair of lights—dismal points in the watery gloom. Lying lifeless along the bottom is a hulk of cold, bent metal. A woman’s face looms behind a square of glass, blue-white and familiar, her pale hair fanned out like a halo around her head. She floats there with eyes closed, a grisly mermaid, the sunken place at her temple strangely bloodless. And then suddenly her eyes are not closed. They’re wide and glassy, vivid violet through all that water. And then the blue-tinged lips begin to move. The words are garbled and indecipherable, but there is a sense of despair in the empty eyes, of desolation and loss as her lips continue moving, as if she is trying to impart some terrible secret. A confession? A prayer? An apology come too late? There is no way to know. And then without warning, the violet eyes are shuttered, the blue lips suddenly quiet. All is still again beneath the waves. But Christy-Lynn does not swim away. Instead, she remains, floating, waiting—willing the dead violet eyes to open again.

TWENTY

Sweetwater, Virginia

May 1, 2017

Christy-Lynn stared at the stacks of papers on her desk but couldn’t make herself focus. The dream had come again last night, as it had nearly every night for the last five weeks—since the night she’d gone up to Silver Lake to see Wade.

She was no stranger to dark dreams—she had suffered night terrors well into adolescence—but this was different, the images so disturbingly vivid they often left her gasping and drenched with sweat. But the dreams had begun to take a physical toll too. She’d been lethargic of late and punchy, the by-product of being afraid to close her eyes for fear of being jolted awake in the wee hours.