Thomas unlocks the door, gestures for me to enter.

My house has a vaulted foyer. Slate tile below, black wrought-iron chandelier above, switchback staircase straight ahead. I move to the cherrywood side table without even thinking. Two framed pictures. One appears to be us, younger, happier, laughing on a beach. The frame features broken pottery tiles and I immediately think of Mexico. Good trip. We’d breakfasted on tequila and spent the afternoons racing WaveRunners through crashing surf. We’d been dangerous and silly and madly, passionately in love.

I miss Mexico. Still do.

Next up, a black-and-white portrait. Not a couples shot at all. Just me, backlit by something, maybe a table lamp. You can’t see my expression, only my profile, wisps of dark hair curling provocatively. There is something pensive about the photo, and I set it down reflexively.

“I always liked that picture of you,” Thomas says. He throws his keys in a basket on the table, trying to watch me while not appearing to be watching me.

I know without asking that he took that photo and I’d been crying right beforehand. A raw, eyes-streaming, nose-running, throat-hiccupping jag that had concerned him so much he’d gotten out his camera in order to distract me.

Sometimes I cry for no reason.

See, I remember something about myself after all.

I follow Thomas deeper into the home, coming face-to-face with the chocolate leather sofa, the glass coffee table. The kitchen is off the family room. Lighter, maple-wood cabinets, because I didn’t want the room to feel too dark. A backsplash of seafoam-green glass tiles because they reminded me of the ocean. A parlor table for two, wrought-iron base, butterfly mosaic inlay because I always yearned to fly.

This is my room. As well as the sunroom directly off of it, with its crazy alternating lime-green and pink-magenta walls. Thomas had groaned the second he saw the colors. Don’t make me do it, he’d dramatized in mock horror. But it was my room, my space, and I could have it any way I wanted, so I’d gone with lime green and pink magenta.

Just as long as it didn’t have a painted rosebush, climbing up the walls.

“Work shed is out the back,” he says now, gesturing to the door off the sunroom. “Here is where you work. There is where I work.”

“Not side by side?”

“Not too often. I build; you paint. And between the two of us, the work gets done.”

He leads me upstairs. No pictures on the wall and for some reason this surprises me, as if I’d been expecting them. The second floor has three bedrooms, including a master with its own bath. That room has a tray ceiling and a truly massive four-poster cherrywood bed.

My first thought is there is no way I picked out that formal monstrosity. Thomas must have done it, because I already hate it.

He doesn’t say anything, just completes the short, guided tour.

“Why such a big house for just the two of us?” I ask. “Do we entertain often, host many guests?”

“We liked this house, even though it was bigger than we needed. And, given that we do work together, sometimes it’s nice to have extra space.”

I walk into the smaller of the two extra bedrooms. It features a lovely white-painted wrought-iron daybed, covered in a quilt of butter yellow.

“I like this room.”

He doesn’t say anything.

I touch one corner of the quilt, finger it in my hand. It is hand-stitched, handcrafted. But not by me, I think instantly. The skill demonstrated here is well beyond my pay grade. And yet . . .

I know who made this quilt. I miss her.

And just for a moment, I feel it again. That sense of hollowness deep inside my chest. Yearning.

“You can sleep here if you want,” Thomas says quietly.

“Okay.” I don’t even look at him. This room is mine; the master is his. He can tell me whatever he wants. I know better.

Thomas wonders if I’m hungry. Actually, I am. We return downstairs, where he whips up two cheese omelets. I slice up a cantaloupe, admiring the fine edge on the knife’s blade. If this kitchen is my domain, clearly I take my equipment seriously.

We sit at the parlor table and I realize I’m moving automatically, already following rhythms that must have developed over the past six months we’ve lived here. A party of two, banging around twenty-four hundred square feet, with cozy taste in furniture and surprisingly few pictures, knickknacks or personal decorations on the wall.

I wonder if we finished unpacking all the moving boxes. Or if we’re simply people who prefer a very clean approach to home décor.

After dinner, Thomas suggests we watch a movie. But I can tell he’s fading again, clearly dead on his feet. In contrast, I finally feel awake, curiously wired, as if the fog is lifting and if I just focus long enough, try hard enough, all the secrets of the universe will be mine.

I tell Thomas he should go to bed. He tries to protest. I shoo him away, and finally, with a frown, he takes the hint.

As he disappears upstairs, I pick up the remote and determine I have no problem running the system or finding all my favorite channels. As long as I don’t think too much, just act, I have no problems at all.

I tune in to TV Land. Watch old episodes of Gilligan’s Island, which seems a safe enough show for a woman with multiple head injuries. Not too exciting, no threat of violence. Well, other than the Skipper smacking Gilligan with his hat time and time again. I draw the line at Golden Girls, though. I’m not that desperate.

I turn off the TV, roam the family room. I discover a pile of books, mostly paperbacks. Apparently I like to read Nora Roberts, while Thomas favors Ken Follett. I reenter the kitchen, and then, because I simply have to know, I go through all the cabinets and then the pantry.

Sure enough, no alcohol. Not a single can of beer, not a single bottle of wine. Let alone a decent bottle of scotch.

For a moment, I’m disappointed. Terribly, dreadfully. Because wouldn’t a nice glass of single malt be perfect right about now?

I leave the kitchen, head upstairs. My breath grows ragged in my chest, but I survive the hike. Back to the little room with the lovely butter-yellow quilt.

There, I lie down fully clothed, my legs straight, my hands folded on my chest. Like a girl in a coffin.

And then, I inhale.

Vero.

She is little again. Small and bubbly with chubby cheeks and fat fists. Airplane noises as she runs around the tiny room, leaping over pillows, willing her body into flight.

I love you, I love you, I love you.

Vero flies. Vero falls.

Ominous footsteps down the hall.

I’m dreaming, I tell myself.

I’m still dreaming, I remind myself.

As I watch Thomas burst into the room.

Chapter 11

THE FRANKS LIVED in a relatively new gray-painted Colonial. Black shutters, covered farmer’s porch, a winding brick walkway that curved through an attractive front flower bed. This late in the season, the bed still offered up some ragged pansies and those cabbage-looking things Wyatt never knew what to call. Meaning someone had taken the time and effort to update the plantings in the fall. Nicky Frank? Her husband, Thomas?

Many things to learn, which was why Kevin and Wyatt decided to start the morning with a personal house call.

Tessa’s comments from yesterday were still weighing heavily on Wyatt. How much did they really know about Nicky Frank, having never talked to her directly? Including but not limited to, how much did she remember from her past three “accidents”? Because cars rarely went sailing off the road while in neutral. Coulda happened, he supposed. Driver falls asleep, knocks the car out of gear while coasting down a steep grade, but it didn’t feel probable. Which made Wyatt wonder about the scotch as well. Had Nicky been drinking of her own accord? Or had someone been doing their best to make sure a woman with a known brain injury and doctor’s orders not to imbibe didn’t wake up at the wheel?