“This man,” Reese said, after a minute of visibly suppressing her questions. “Do you love him or hate him?”

“Both, I think.”

“And how does he feel about you? Does he love you or hate you?”

“Maybe both.”

“You’ve left him now?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you resolve the thing from your past?”

Kelly shook her head. “Nothing is resolved. But the only way to resolve it is to go back to him, and that just feels—wrong in every way.”

Reese was silent for a long time. A really long time. Until finally she said, “Well, I don’t know. I guess you need to figure out what’s worse for you. Leaving all of it unresolved and living with the mess as it is. Or going through with it—even if it means the whole mess explodes all over you—because there might be a chance for some of the mess to finally clear.”

As was often the case, Reese had gotten it exactly right.

—

The next morning, Kelly had breakfast with Jack Martin at a dingy diner near his office that he evidently loved.

She did her best to explain to him what had happened.

He listened without talking much, perhaps because he was busy packing away a plate of eggs, bacon, and toast. But when she finished her slightly censored rehearsal of events, he leaned back in his booth and thought in silence for a minute.

Finally, he said, “Well, I guess you shouldn’t have fallen for him.”

She stiffened dramatically in indignation. She hadn’t said anything about falling for Caleb, but Jack wasn’t an idiot. He’d obviously read between the lines. “Would you like me reach over the table and smack you?”

Jack chuckled and took a gulp of coffee. “Not really. I’m an old-fashioned guy, and that kind of thing doesn’t turn me on.”

She rolled her eyes, trying to maintain her annoyance with him. It was harder than it should have been. “I didn’t meet with you to hear you state the obvious—especially when you’re being obnoxious about it.”

“Yeah. I know. But I don’t really know what else to tell you. I’m still working on digging things up on him, but I can’t guarantee to get an answer to you about whether he’s guilty or not.”

“It’s hard for me to know what to do, since I don’t have the answer to that question.”

“I guess. But it seems to me that your choices are the same either way. Marshall is a bad guy, whether he’s done this particular thing wrong or not. Are you really picturing a happy future with him if he happens to be cleared on this?”

She shook her head. “I’m not picturing any sort of happy future. I just want some sort of—resolution. I don’t know how I can go on without it. What am I supposed to do if I just drop it now?”

Jack put his coffee cup down and leaned forward. His voice was uncharacteristically earnest as he said, “You live your life. You do your job. You paint all the cutesy pet portraits you can. You hang out with your friends. You try to do good wherever you’re able to. You find some nice guy—maybe a stunningly handsome guy in the security business—to go out with. He wouldn’t be a slouch in the sack, you know.” His eyes gleamed briefly with dry humor before he concluded, “You settle back into real life. Why would that be so impossible? I know you’ve been wounded in all this, but don’t you think it would be better for you to just let the wound heal?”

She let out a shaky breath, suddenly wanting the future he’d painted so much she could taste it. A peaceful existence. A job she enjoyed. A nice, normal guy like Jack. But it was as out of her grasp as it had always been—even when the name Caleb Marshall wasn’t yet a blip on her radar.

She’d never believed that kind of life was possible. She was still trapped in the woods, next to the bleeding body of her father.

And she understood something then, sitting across from Jack in an old diner on a sunny morning in May. And she knew it even more deeply as she said the words out loud. “But that only works if the wound is a clean one. And mine isn’t. It’s mangled and infected and covered by nothing by scar tissue. Time doesn’t fix that.”

She saw this truth register on his rugged face as he let out a long exhale. “Yeah. I guess that might be right.”

“Maybe the wound has to be ripped back open, if I ever want it to heal clean.”

—

After breakfast, she went back to her apartment to pick up her stuff. She still wasn’t ready to move back in there. For one, Caleb would be able to find her, and she wasn’t ready to face him yet. She didn’t know if he would come looking for her eventually, but he might.

For another, the familiar rooms and all of her possessions seemed to taunt her with their superficiality—as if all of the years between her father’s death and Caleb were just a pretense of existence.

Maybe they were.

Either way, she needed to get some more clothes if she was going to keep staying with Reese, so she stopped by quickly on her way back from breakfast.

When she walked into her living area, she saw her mother sitting on her sofa.

Kelly pulled to a stop, her purse slipping slowly off her arm. “What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you.” Her mother was as pale and cold and deadened as the last time she’d seen her, almost a month ago now.

“Have you been living here?”

“No. But I’ve been keeping tabs on you, and I thought you might drop by yesterday or today, since you’ve walked out on him, so I came here to wait.”

Kelly took a couple of deep breaths and walked over to sit on the chair across from her mother. “What do you want?”

“I want to hear an update. Why haven’t you replied to any of my messages? Why did you leave him?”

She’d known her mother would be angry and disappointed, which is why she’d been trying to avoid her. Her mother’s entire life had been shaped around this one grief, this one loss, and even her daughter had been made a victim of it. This was the last thing Kelly was equipped to deal with now. “I needed some space. I don’t think you understand how hard this thing is for me to do.”

“Why is it hard? So, you had to fuck him. You’ve used your body before.”

“Not like this.”

Her mother was peering at her with a scary sort of scrutiny. “You’ve fallen in love with the monster.”

The tone was horrified, outraged, utterly betrayed, and it felt like a physical blow. Kelly winced and looked away.

“Ungrateful, disloyal little bitch,” her mother muttered.

And that just made Kelly angry. She stiffened in her chair and glared back at her mother. “You can call me anything you want. It won’t come close to what I think of you. Did Jack Martin tell you that Caleb might not even be guilty of Dad’s murder? I bet he did, and you just ignored it. Well, you can continue your narrow, foolish vendetta if you want, ignoring the fact that you might have been going after the wrong person from the very beginning. You can ignore any flicker of humanity you have left in your cold, dead heart. But I’m not willing to do so. And I don’t think Dad would have wanted me to. I’m not going to bring a man down if he isn’t guilty of the crime.”

“He is guilty. You’re just deceiving yourself because you don’t want him to be. But what do you think will happen when he finds out what you’ve been doing? There’s no sappy romantic honeymoon waiting for you. You know what he’s like now. You know it more deeply than anyone. And do you think he’ll have mercy on you, after you’ve betrayed him so deeply, when he’s never had mercy on anyone who has ever stood in his way?”

It was true. Kelly knew it was true. If Caleb ever found out what she’d done and why she’d done it, his hatred would burn hotter toward her than it had ever burned for anyone before. No one had ever betrayed Caleb the way she had.

But it didn’t matter. She wasn’t after a happy ending here. She’d never been after a happy ending. She knew what she wanted now, what she needed, the only thing that could possibly allow her to take a step forward after today.