But it would be hard to go alone.

When was the last time she traveled far from home completely on her own?

The semester abroad she did back when she was an undergrad English major at the University of Alabama?

Those four months in London felt like a stepping-stone to a future spent traveling the world. But then it was over and she was back in Tuscaloosa, and the next thing she knew, that, too, was over. She graduated and found herself back at home, where she spent the summer sending out résumés for jobs in London, jobs in New York, Chicago, L.A. . . .

A few weeks later she met Rob, and almost simultaneously was hired as an assistant in a tiny PR firm in Mobile. She decided that everything she wanted and needed—for the time being, anyway—was right here.

“Mom?”

“Hmm?”

“You’re going to Cincinnati, right?”

“Of course,” she tells Addison. “Of course I’m going.”

And somewhere in the back of her mind, a flicker of anticipation accompanies her apprehension.

“Hi, you’ve reached Landry Wells,” drawls a pleasant, recorded voice. “Please leave a message and I’ll get right back to you. Have a great day!”

Elena hesitates, then hangs up without leaving a message. By the time Landry returns the call, this brief lunch break will probably be over. Better to wait until she gets home tonight and try her back then.

She looks again at the headline on her computer screen, the one that made her heart pound when she first clicked on it. The kids were still in the classroom then, so she couldn’t react. Now they’re in the cafeteria, and the salad-filled Tupperware container she brought from home is sitting untouched on her desk.

LOCAL WOMAN MURDERED IN APPARENT HOME INVASION

There isn’t much detail in the article. It doesn’t report how Meredith was killed or where she was in the house when it happened. Standard procedure, Elena guesses, to leave out certain details. It’s an active police investigation. No mention of suspects, and anyone who can provide a lead is asked to call a special crime hotline.

“Elena?”

She looks up to see Tony Kerwin, the gym teacher—again. The guy manages to find his way into her classroom several times a day, and she’s not exactly in the mood for him right now.

Really, she’s never in the mood for Tony.

Ironic, because when he walked into the first staff meeting right after he was hired here last fall, she was immediately drawn to him. So was her friend Sidney, a fellow teacher and recent divorcée.

When Tony introduced himself, it turned out he was in his early thirties, like Elena. He had grown up south of Providence, just as she had—he was from Cranston, she from neighboring Warwick.

Over drinks after the meeting, Sidney mused, “The new gym teacher looks like what’s his name—that hot actor who was in the movie we watched on cable last weekend . . .”

“Mark Wahlberg?”

“Yup. Do you think he’s married?”

“Mark Wahlberg?” Elena chose to deliberately misunderstand the question, buying herself a moment to decide whether she wanted to admit to Sidney that she, too, found him attractive. If she did, Sidney would probably back off in her intended pursuit.

As a statuesque, slender blonde, Sidney has no shortage of dates and—to her credit—is well aware that men gravitate toward her instead of relatively short, curvy, brunette Elena when they’re together.

“I don’t care whether Mark Wahlberg is married!” Sidney said. “I’m talking about the new gym teacher.”

“Nope. Not married—unless he is and he doesn’t wear a ring.”

“You looked?”

She grinned at Sidney over the rim of her pinot grigio glass. “Oh, I definitely looked.”

With that comment, Elena knew, she’d sealed the unspoken deal. Sidney would let her have the first shot at Tony.

It’s hard to remember, now, that there was a time when she thought of him as potential dating material . . . let alone that she actually went out with him.

Just once, back in September.

Once was all it took for her to realize that the guy was an opinionated jackass. Sidney was welcome to him—except by then she didn’t want him, either.

But he wanted Elena. He persisted in asking her out, so clueless that she finally resorted to inventing a fake boyfriend to get rid of him.

That was Meredith’s advice; Elena had confided in her about the situation. Confided in her about almost everything, really.

Tell him that you’re seeing someone else, Meredith wrote in an e-mail after Elena told her she couldn’t shake Tony.

You want me to lie? I can’t believe it! Elena wrote back teasingly. And here I thought you were a fine moral character.

Where did you get that idea? was the response, followed by ;-)—the Internet emoticon symbolizing a wink. A little white lie never hurt anyone. Trust me.

Meredith was right. It did the trick.

“I hope he makes you very happy,” Tony said about her fictitious boyfriend, and every time she saw him after that—which was every single weekday—he’d give her a sappy, sad little smile and ask how things were going in her relationship.

It took him a few months to stop asking and stop sad-smiling. In February he overheard Elena asking Sidney if she wanted to go to a singles night, and he asked if she’d broken up with her boyfriend.

Forced to say yes, she braced herself for him to start asking her out again, but it turned out he was dating someone else by then—or so he claimed. Sidney thought he was just trying to make her jealous, ostensibly playing hard to get.

“Either that,” she said, “or he’s seriously delusional, because I can’t imagine why anyone in her right mind would go out with him.”

“I did.”

“Once. And anyone would, once, because he’s gorgeous.”

The strange thing is, Elena barely notices the gorgeous anymore. It’s too hard to see past the desperate and the crazy.

“What’s up?” Elena asks him now, not in the mood for small talk.

“I got your note about the collection for a retirement gift for Betty Jamison.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“I don’t think it’s fair to ask everyone on the staff to contribute the same amount. Some of us barely know this woman.”

It’s impossible for anyone to be employed at Northmeadow Elementary for any length of time and not have regular contact with Betty Jamison, head secretary in the main office, and the most beloved person on the staff.

But Elena opts not to waste time saying any of that to Tony. “Just donate what you think is fair, then.”

“That’s the trouble. I don’t want to come across as cheap if everyone else is donating more. What I think you might want to do is reword the memo so that . . .”

He drones on.

Elena’s hand clenches around the computer mouse. She looks again at the computer screen, thinks again about Meredith.

Thinks of her lying there, lifeless.

She never knew what hit her.

The line fits, but the voice in Elena’s head isn’t referring to Meredith.

No, she’s remembering what her father said to her uncle after her mother was killed. It happened twenty-five years ago, when she was an eavesdropping seven-year-old, but she remembers the conversation like it was yesterday.

Her father was repeating what the police had told him about the accident. Apparently, the signal at the railroad crossing had failed, so her mother had driven onto the tracks into the path of an oncoming train . . .

“She never knew what hit her. That’s what they told me, Louie . . .”

“You gotta admit, Bobby—it’s not the worst way to go,” her uncle had said.

“What are you talking about?”

“No drawn-out suffering—not like Ma.” The brothers had lost their mother, Elena’s grandmother, not long before that. Cancer.

Of course, cancer. Always cancer . . .

Well, not always.