“People you worked with?”

“A couple of them came from the company I worked for. I hadn’t had the job that long, didn’t know too many people. I found the people who liked to go out right away. I had a talent for it.” She laughed hollowly. “I was doing clerical work for Union Insurance.”

“I need some names, Sierra.”

“Sure. I can give you the names of some friends. My old roommate and her boyfriend. My old boss—but she was a battle-ax and I never shared anything about my life with her. She hated me. I wasn’t crazy about her. I was... I wasn’t the best employee.”

“In those two weeks did you ever learn anything more about the guy? Can you think of anything?”

She shook her head. “Just the stuff I told you—he had a lot of stories. A lot of jokes. He buddied up to people. He gave them dope, like pot or ecstasy. They couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to hang out with him. After all, he was so much fun and he liked me. It was awful. I didn’t want to explain why I knew he was bad news.”

“Think about it and make me a list—any connections that could give us information about the guy because he’s gone. And I’d like your permission to tell Maggie about this. She’s very good at confidences, so don’t worry about that.”

“Why do you have to tell her?” she asked, feeling her eyes brighten with tears she knew she wouldn’t be able to shed.

“Because, Sierra, we have to go back. You have to talk to the police. They’re looking for you. They want to question you. I’m sure they want to know how the accident happened. Maybe they hope you can get them to the guy.”

“Why? The guy he hit recovered. Can’t we just stay away?”

“Here’s the deal, Sierra. They know it was your car, they know you’ve disappeared, they know there was a felony hit-and-run. If you know they’re looking for you in a felony investigation and you don’t come forward, they can hit you with obstruction. Or you can wait till they find you, and it can sneak up on you. At the most inconvenient moment, you can find yourself taken into custody for questioning and I want to be with you. I don’t want that to happen while I’m busy having a baby. Let me tell Maggie why I have to go back with you and let’s get this done.”

“And what if we get there and they lock me up?” she asked.

“Cooperating now is the safest thing to do. Once you tell the police where you are and how you can be reached, they probably won’t restrict you. I don’t think they will anyway. You’re not their primary suspect.”

“Who could be a witness?” she asked, frowning in confusion.

Cal shook his head. “Another motorist? Maybe even the victim?”

“Cal. He drove a red Nissan GT—a sports car. It was almost new. Candy-apple red.”

“That might help, but it’s a popular car. They’re going to ask you why you ran if you weren’t driving the car.”

“Can they make me press charges against him? Seeing him again terrifies me.”

Cal just locked eyes with her, looking at her steadily. “You might have to be braver than you’ve ever been. If I thought there was an easier way, I’d tell you.”

She laughed without humor. “Eventually you always have to pay the bill.”

“It was not your fault,” Cal said.

“Oh, I know that,” she said. “But running away made me feel like a victim. And by saying nothing, I hid him. And because I was too afraid of him to act, he might be getting away with everything. Now I have to ask myself—how many people has he hurt in this past year?”

“What are we going to do about that?” Cal asked her.

“I’m going to tell the truth. And pray.”

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

—Anatole France

Chapter 14

A YEAR AGO TOM had wondered if he would ever have a full life. He had four great kids and was certainly blessed with work. While a lot of people couldn’t find a job it seemed like he had jobs coming out of his ears. He had even accepted that he had a very unusual relationship with his wife. His ex-wife. They lived apart and he raised the children, but she was a regular presence for a few days at a time. Kind of like being married to an airline pilot.

And then he had to face the hard truth—Becky was not just a divorcée who had occasional boyfriends. She was a prostitute. She called herself an escort, but the bottom line was always the same—she padded her pocketbook by sleeping with men. He conceded she was a pretty upscale hooker who made excellent money. He was even grateful she didn’t seem to fit the profile he’d seen on most cop shows—she hadn’t been driven into prostitution by a pimp or dependence on drugs. No, nothing as horrifying as that. She was just a beautiful woman who had found a way to supplement her income with sex. Which she enjoyed.

“Not with strangers,” she’d argued. “They were all gentlemen I was seeing, men I knew. If I hadn’t taken money, I’d be just an average woman—dating, having sex sometimes as adults do.”

“I’m not buying it,” Tom had said. “And the house rules change, right now. The kids aren’t going to your place anymore and you’re not spending the night here.”

“You can’t do that,” she said. “They’re my kids, too.”

“We do this my way or I’ll tell them.”

“No, don’t! They’re too young to understand!”

“Becky, I’m too young to understand!” he shot back.

“Fine. I’ve stopped that job anyway.”

“I don’t believe it,” he said. “You’ve been lying to me for years, why would I believe you now? So here’s the deal—you can visit the kids here, with my supervision, as long as you make plans ahead of time. No overnights.”

“What am I supposed to tell them?” she asked.

“Tell them you’re very busy with your second job. And if you run into trouble with that second job again, don’t call me. Call your lawyer.”

He knew that was the right thing to do but that action took some getting used to. Up to that moment, he’d had someone in his life, at least now and then. First he had to deal with the shock and hurt it caused him. Then there was the loneliness. Then the dread of telling his kids—they’d be devastated, he was sure. He knew he’d have to tell them someday.

But they barely noticed their mom was hardly around anymore. They were busy kids; they were a busy family! Every hour was accounted for. They had a lot of responsibility with school and their extracurricular activities.

He’d dealt with the disappointment. He’d always had a passion for Becky, but knowing the wide range her affections had traveled, his urges where she was concerned were gone. He’d finally adjusted to the shock. He could thank Cal for some of that. Cal, who had represented Becky in court, had a unique perspective: “Given my line of work, I’ve been professionally acquainted with a number of working women, you should pardon the expression. I’ve always thought the laws unbalanced in the emphasis, discriminating against women. They should be going after the pimps, traffickers and johns before the working girls. I don’t care who an adult has sex with but I do care about human trafficking, kidnapping, child abuse, extortion, human bondage, slavery, et cetera. A good old-fashioned hooker, exercising some discrimination, her own boundaries, minding health and safety...” He had shrugged.

“You’d care if you were her husband,” Tom had said.

Cal had clamped a hand on his shoulder and said, for at least the tenth time “Good thing you haven’t been married to her for about eight years, then.”

So then Tom had to face the embarrassing truth—that he’d been willing to forgive and forget anything because he wanted his wife home, his wife who had not been his wife in years.

But now there was Lola. He’d known her almost his whole life. She was a couple of years older than Tom, had been ahead of him in school. Tom had grown up on a local ranch; his dad kept cows and grew alfalfa. Her dad worked in the hardware and farm equipment store. They’d both married too young, had nothing much in common as couples, divorced and became single parents, too busy for much socializing.

Now he was looking at Lola in a whole new way. The reason being, he was a one-woman man, period. When he thought of Becky as his wife, even his part-time wife, his eyes just wouldn’t stray. Once he let go of that notion he realized how much he liked Lola. Rather, he realized all the things he liked about her. Her curly dark hair, her rosy cheeks, her pleasantly round figure, her large dark eyes. She had red lips and a ready laugh. She was funny. He’d always known all these things about Lola but he hadn’t appreciated them before. People loved her. She’d been a fixture in the diner and Home Depot for so many years, everyone knew her and everyone liked talking to her when they stopped at the diner for coffee or an ice cream sundae, or maybe Home Depot for paint or home repair supplies.

As far as Tom knew, there hadn’t been a man in her life in years. He started off with a potted plant, then a second, then a phone call. He’d had to think for hours and hours what pretense he would use for calling her. “There’s a home show in Colorado Springs and I was thinking of going. Always good to keep up on that stuff, what’s new, what’s still popular, what’s innovative. You have any interest in that?”

Now there’d been four plants, many phone calls, he’d taken her out to see Cal’s house in progress, he’d shown her his house and they had a new hobby—looking at model homes and open houses. They could spend hours talking about construction, remodeling, new decorator items, paint. They invested almost an hour of porch time talking about sinks! That’s when he held her hand. For the first time. And he laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Lola asked him.