It had been true for her job and for her marriage and, apparently, for Dave Holman as well. Things happened. Circumstances changed. Life moved on. And as Ali logged on to Cutloose that night, it wasn’t because she felt a need to revisit or wallow in her own misery. In fact, it was exactly the opposite. She had journeyed a long way from the awful pain she’d been in when she first started the blog. She went there now knowing that the stories she was likely to find would allow her to count her blessings.

For old time’s sake, she scrolled through that day’s postings. The stories were achingly familiar.

My husband ran off with my sister. I’ve got three kids, no job, no car, and no money. What am I going to do?

Go to work, Ali thought. Get a job. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

As she scanned through the string of reader comments, she saw that was what the other writers were saying as well: Don’t sit around blaming your husband; be responsible for yourself; get a life. Some of the correspondents couched their suggestions in less confrontational ways, but they were all pretty much of a piece-a course in tough love; self-love seasoned with ample amounts of good common sense. Obviously, Adele was keeping Cutlooseblog.com on track, staying true to Ali’s original mission.

Ali was interested to see that Cutloose seemed to have attracted a fair number of male readers.

Thank you for showing me that I’m not the only man in the world who’s a victim of domestic violence. It helps to know that there are others out there like me who are finding the courage to speak out. Maybe there’s hope for me and my kids.

The posts that followed that were a mixed bag. Two amazingly angry women declared in no uncertain terms that men were ALWAYS the perpetrators and NEVER the victims in domestic-violence situations. But one correspondent included a toll-free number where men could call to locate family-style shelters in their geographical area that would take male victims and their children right along with women.

While I was off on a business trip with my boss, I had too much to drink and ended up in his room. When we got back home, he fired me. What do I do now?

Get another job, Ali thought. Again the accompanying posts echoed that sentiment, some of them with the added proviso of: Quit drinking!!!

Ali found it all interesting, but more as a trip down memory lane than anything else. She really had moved on, and she wondered how long her successor would be able to keep it up before she, too, would need to hand Cutloose off to someone else-to new blood, as it were.

Leaving Cutloose behind, Ali logged on to the virtual edition of Phoenix’s daily newspaper, the Arizona Reporter. There, in the statewide news section, she found an article on Morgan Forester’s homicide.

Morgan Forester, age twenty-seven, wife of prominent Sedona area contractor Bryan Forester, was found bludgeoned to death on the front porch of their rural home outside the Village of Oak Creek. Mrs. Forester had been dead for some time when the body was discovered by her two young children as they returned home from school. The Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office is investigating. “This is an extremely tragic situation,” said Demetri Hartfield, Yavapai County media relations officer. “We know she died of homicidal violence. At this point, however, we have no suspects and no persons of interest.”

That’s not entirely true, Ali thought. Dave Holman definitely has a person of interest in this case.

Neighbors up and down the lonely length of Verde Valley School Road reported seeing nothing at all out of the ordinary. The house itself is in a scheduled area half a mile from its nearest neighbor and screened from the road by a rise that would have concealed events at the house from passersby. “Morgan was a wonderful woman and the best friend anyone could ever want,” said neighbor Sally Upchurch. “She was a full-time mom who loved being at home and who absolutely doted on her two little daughters. She adored her husband as well. They’re just the nicest family, all of them. I can’t imagine how such a terrible thing could happen.” Bryan Forester and his two daughters are reportedly in seclusion somewhere in the Sedona area. Through a family spokesman, he asked that they be left to grieve in peace during this difficult time. Services for Mrs. Forester are pending and will be announced at a later date.

The problem is, Dave Holman can imagine such evil very easily, Ali thought, and now so can I.

Bad things really did happen to good people. Ali Reynolds herself was a case in point. Her husband had abandoned her to father out-of-wedlock children with not one but two other women. As a result, when he had been trussed in the trunk of a car and left on a railroad track to be run down by a speeding freight train, she had immediately been viewed as a prime suspect.

But all that worked itself out eventually, Ali told herself. Dave Holman may be a less than perfect father and lover, but he’s a good detective. If Bryan Forester is innocent of murdering his wife, then Dave is the one who’ll sort it out. It’s none of my affair.

Ali looked at the clock and was astonished to see that while she had been staring at her computer screen, several hours had zipped by unnoticed. She logged off, shut down her computer, closed it, and put it away.

As soon as she turned out the light, Sam relented. The cat returned to the bedroom and to her spot on the side of Ali’s bed, landing on it with a soft thud. As Sam curled up and settled down, Ali reached out and put one hand on the purring cat.

“Not our business,” Ali said aloud as she drifted off to sleep. But Sam wasn’t listening. Unfortunately, neither was anyone else.

Sleepless, Matt Morrison lay in bed and tried to figure out what had happened. For the thousandth time that day, he asked himself the same question. Why had Susan stood him up? After all, she was the one who had come up with the idea of meeting in the first place. Susan Callison-Suzie Q in her profile-was thirty-seven years old, married, had no children, and sold real estate. She had told him in their many online encounters that her fantasy was to meet up with a guy and “do it” somewhere they weren’t supposed to be-preferably in somebody’s model home. By seven A.M. that morning, an eager Matt had been at the appointed place sixty miles south of Phoenix, parked in the driveway of one of the model homes in a new planned-living development called Red Rock Ridge.

For someone like Matt, who had always followed the rules and kept his nose to the grindstone, Susan’s explicit online chats had made the whole idea sound amazingly daring and out there. Making love with a stranger in a strange bed or elsewhere was something totally out of character for him, which was why he had jumped at the chance. It was why he had gone. He had driven down I-10 anticipating the idea that for once in his incredibly boring life, he was about to have the kind of sex he’d read about in books and seen in movies-something that would literally knock his socks off.

He had shown up early, a good twenty minutes before he was expected, but beautiful blond Suzie Q hadn’t showed. Anxious minutes had ticked off one by one while he waited and waited. Worried that she might have been in an accident somewhere along the way, he would have loved to call her, but she had never given him her number. “Better not,” she had counseled in an instant message. “Too dangerous.” So he hadn’t been able to call, and without his computer, he couldn’t e-mail or instant-message her. Instead, he had waited for the better part of two hours. When construction workers at some of the other houses on the street had started giving him funny looks, he had driven away.

At first he’d had a hard time deciding where to go. Having left word at the office that he was on his way to Tucson, he couldn’t very well show back up without some kind of explanation. He couldn’t go home, either. Eventually, he’d made his way back to a truck stop in Eloy. There he’d sat at the counter and swilled several cups of coffee and thought about the call of the open road. What would life be like if he had become a trucker instead of an auditor? He tried to see himself at the wheel of an eighteen-wheeler with nothing ahead of him but mile after mile of blacktop. What if he didn’t have to come home each night to a woman who barely tolerated his presence?