“No, Liv. I’m all set. I’m just worried about you. About what they were saying . . .”

I flinched. “What were they saying?”

He frowned. “That you needed stitches. That you’d gotten hurt. And I didn’t know, I didn’t ask you then . . .” His throat moved before he continued. “I didn’t ask if you’d been hurt out there.”

I shook my head. “I tripped. Running to your house.” I heard the flutter of tape caught in the wind. I tried to reconcile the Rick I knew with the one Detective Rigby knew. Yes, he had a key. He knew where the spare had been. His light was on when I ran to his house that night.

I gritted my teeth. This was the detective, this was how it worked—the story planted by someone else, growing into its own thing, its own mess.

And I had to get ahead of it. “Listen, Rick, did they say anything about the man’s car? Was it nearby?”

“No. They showed me his picture, that’s all. No one’s telling me anything. Not who he is, not what he was doing here. Not how he got here. Though I’d imagine it’d be pretty hard to tell, what with all the animals, to know which way he came from. Whether he came in from the front road or somewhere in the back.”

The back. Our houses backed to trees, but the property eventually sloped down to a creek. I’d been that far only once. After the creek, the land crept upward toward someone else’s property, someone else’s home.

“I’m fine, Rick,” I said. “Call if you need anything, okay? I’ll be out for a bit.”

“The man who was here last night,” he said, stepping closer. “That your boyfriend?”

“Just a friend.” I unlocked the car, not needing to get into the specifics.

“Well, he was arguing with that other girl. Out front. I could hear it all the way from my house. I was working in the yard, cleaning up the mess from the police.”

Suddenly, I pictured Rick in my backyard when Elyse was here, just beyond the tree line. How close he had been. And how he’d noticed me walking to my car just now. Detective Rigby’s words about his relationship with his own son—that his attention was stifling. There could be an element of truth in that.

I opened the car door. “They’re very different personalities,” I said. I could picture it, Bennett telling Elyse she had to get home, get some sleep. Work protocol, and he was the one in charge. “But they’re both good people. Good friends.” God, how I needed that to be true.

I KNEW, AS SOON as I pulled into the hospital lot, that I’d missed her. She always parked her white car near the lot exit when she was working—for a fast escape, she joked. This was something else I had liked about her—this feeling that maybe she was always tallying the steps to her escape as well, but she had the confidence to joke about it. I wondered if I’d ever reach that point, if I weren’t so busy trying to hide it.

After circling the lot twice to be sure, I idled in an empty spot, called her cell once more, but hung up as soon as I got her voice-mail again. Chances were, she went straight home after the night shift and fell asleep. She usually had Sunday off, and she probably needed the day to catch up. At least I hoped that was why she hadn’t gotten back to me yet.

THE G&M ON A Sunday morning looked about the same as any other morning. A scattering of cars, a vague sense of déjà vu, so I could almost picture the blue car, Sean Coleman’s forearms leaning on the hood, the rustle of the wrapper of his breakfast sandwich.

I know you.

I parked close to the entrance and walked through the automatic doors, feeling ungrounded. Inside, the same man sat behind the register, the same silent show on in the background. He was helping someone at the register.

Dr. Sydney Britton, like a repeat of Friday. “Hi, good morning,” I said as she headed toward the exit.

She stopped dead in her tracks when she noticed me. “Liv. How are you feeling? You’re not on your way in to work already, are you?”

“No, I just came for a coffee.”

“The leg?” she asked, nodding at my knee.

“Seems a lot better already.” I still held it out straight when I sat down, and I still took the stairs slowly, but I thought that was more out of caution than necessity.

“Good, that’s good. Take care, and we’ll see you for a follow-up next week, okay?” She hitched her purse on her shoulder, turning to go. The bottle in the white plastic bag clanked against something else. I could see the outline of the frozen meal.

“Sydney, wait,” I said. “Do you remember the other day when I ran into you here?”

She blinked slowly. “Sure.”

“Do you remember someone else in here with us?”

She smiled tightly. “The ends of shifts all sort of blend together after a while, Liv.” I wondered if this was her daily routine. Dazed after a night shift, bottle of wine and a microwave dinner. Repeat. “Harvey might know better,” she said, tipping her head to the register.

By the time I turned to thank her, she was already striding out the door.

I walked up to the coffee stand beside the register. “Harvey?” I asked, turning his attention from the television as I filled my cup.

“Can I help you?”

“I was in here a few mornings ago. Friday. I wanted to ask you something.”

His eyes searched my face, but he didn’t respond.

“You said I had an eclectic basket. You asked for my ID.”

He nodded slowly, tentatively.

“Do you remember another man in the store?”

His face changed then, eyes closing. He shook his head. “The police already talked to me. I can’t possibly remember everyone. And as I told them, the recordings don’t save past a day.” He pointed to the camera in the corner, over the television set. “No point, if there’s been no crime. Not worth paying for the storage service. I heard he died. I’m sorry, did you know him?”

“He tried to talk to me,” I said. Wanting desperately to hear what Sean Coleman had to say. What he was there for. Not a journalist. But still coming out of the woodwork twenty years later for a reason.

“I even went through the receipts with the police,” Harvey said, ringing me up. “But I don’t think he bought anything. I sort of remember him browsing. Maybe. I work this shift most mornings, though, and it’s hard to tell them all apart after a while. Same routine, different day,” he said, sharing Sydney’s view.

“Thanks anyway,” I said, paying for the coffee, my fingers shaking.

I SAT IN MY car drinking the coffee, not wanting to go home just yet. Searching the news on my phone to see how far the story had gotten.

The police had been here—in the time since I’d told Detective Rigby about seeing Sean Coleman at the G&M, they’d been here and talked to Harvey. They’d asked for the footage. They’d looked through the receipts. I could picture them pausing at mine, looking closer—A hook-and-eye latch? A bottle of dark rum?

With shaking hands, I typed in Sean’s full name, then held my breath while the results loaded.

There was nothing recent. Social media profiles and job titles. It was a common name. I checked under the News category, but all that came up was some high school kid’s track times. I felt my shoulders relax slightly, then took another sip of coffee.