“Your father was a US senator at the time, right?”

“Yes, the junior senator. He’d just started his second term.”

“Your father liked Daniel’s interest?”

“He was thrilled. He had Daniel’s political future mapped out.”

“That’s insane. What kind of pressure does that put on a kid?”

Michael laughed. “The Senator and Daniel used to talk about it for hours. Where he could go to law school, where was the best school for undergrad—”

“And you? What were your plans?”

“I had no plans.” His voice went flat.

A small stab of sorrow touched Jamie’s heart. She’d seen too many kids in her school ignored by their parents. “That didn’t mean he had no reason to love you.”

Michael twisted up one side of his mouth. “I know my parents loved me. It just didn’t feel like they liked me. I wasn’t the type of kid they’d planned to have. I wasn’t interested in school. I just wanted to skateboard and ski. I used to pay high school kids to take me along when they skipped school and went skiing. I got caught over and over, but I didn’t care.”

“How’d your parents know you went skiing?”

“You know what raccoon eyes are?”

Jamie laughed. “You didn’t know to use sunscreen when skiing?”

“Naw, sunscreen was for wimps.”

Was he trying to avoid her original question by distracting her? “So were you really sick that day?”

He shook his head. “Not at all.”

“When did you find out?”

“Phone calls started coming in. Daniel wasn’t home from school, the bus never returned to the school, no one could locate the bus driver. The Senator was in Washington DC and immediately flew home. My mother didn’t go back to the hospital for three days. I’d never seen them so panicked.”

“Of course they were. Their son was missing. They would have reacted the same way if you’d never come back from skiing.”

The wry look on Michael’s face said he doubted her words.

She sat straighter in the SUV’s seat. “You think they would have simply brushed it off if you vanished? That’s ridiculous. No parent reacts like that!”

Michael tried to control the expression on his face. The absolute indignation on Jamie’s was killing him. His parents had never been the same after Daniel disappeared. Before DD—long ago Michael had divided up his life into Before DD and After DD—he’d simply thought his parents connected better with Daniel, as if they understood the chemical wiring in Daniel’s brain versus the ricocheting impulses that bounced through Michael’s.

At many points in a child’s life, one wonders what it’d be like to be an only child. Michael had experienced that daydream often, assuming all his parents’ focus would be on him…as an adult he’d often thanked God that hadn’t happened. He and his parents would have gone nuts if they’d tried to shape Michael into their own image. Looking back, he’d been grateful that Daniel had meshed so well with them and kept the focus off himself. Once Daniel was gone, the focus never shifted. It’d stayed on Daniel. And Michael had spread his wings. And spread. Usually to the point of risking his neck.

Mountain climbing, check. Run with the bulls in Spain, check. Crab boat trapping in the Bering Sea, check. Infiltrate a Los Angeles biker gang for an exposé on crime, check. That one had nearly cost him his life. He still had the knife scars on his gut and an intense dislike of the harsh tequila that they’d all drunk by the gallon. No margaritas for him, thank you.

“I know my parents cared,” he said. It felt like an over-spoken line in a play. Lifeless and meaningless. Deep down, he knew they’d cared, but for some twisted reason, they couldn’t show it. A therapist had once theorized that they were afraid of the pain of losing another child, so they tried to keep their distance, protecting themselves if something happened to Michael. And perhaps that was why he thrived on risk. Trying to coax a reaction out of his parents.

Michael had stared at the therapist, pulled three hundred dollars out of his wallet, slapped it on the table, walked out, and never returned. Why pay money for what he already knew? What he wanted was someone to fix it. Fix them. Fix him. Give him the family he’d never had, the one that lived in movies and books. It existed; he just had to find it.

Lacey Campbell was the closest thing he had to family. She was the little sister who mothered him when he needed it, sent him to get a haircut, and stocked his fridge when it only held beer and three-day-old pizza. They’d tried romance, but it’d failed. Miserably. Friendship worked best. For a long time, he’d pretended the friendship was fine with him, believing that if he stuck close and waited, it’d evolve into more and it’d be right the second time around. That dream had crashed and burned with the presence of her fiancé. He’d wanted to murder the man at first, but now…he accepted it.

Michael stopped his vehicle in front of a squat brick building in the small town, a large sheriff sign over the door. The town was quiet, one main drag through a row of storefronts, a couple of people moving from store to store. A few empty storefronts echoed the recession that’d stomped on the nation in the last few years. He killed the engine and rolled down his window, surprised that it wasn’t as hot as he’d expected for the dry town in the middle of summer. The elevation must keep it a bit cooler. Jamie lowered her window, too.