I shot straight up in bed.

At our next session, I’d asked Gina what her parents had said. She told me she had forgotten to ask about how her uncle had died. When she had forgotten again at the next session, I stopped asking.

Why had she not been able to ask her parents? And why wouldn’t her parents have told her how he had died?

Maybe because it had never happened.

Gina’s uncle, whoever he was, was alive.

Why hadn’t this possibility occurred to me before now?

I got up and turned on my light. I went to my file cabinet, unlocked it, and shuffled through the files until I found hers. I pulled out the suicide letter she’d written me.

He’s not worth dying for.

Words alone weren’t proof positive that a patient wasn’t suicidal, but they were a damned good indicator. What if Gina hadn’t written this note? What if someone had locked her in a garage with a running car, just as the masked man had done to me?

I was a good therapist, goddamnit. Some of my patients had been suicidal in the past, and I had always known. I had referred them for hospitalization in most cases. So how could I have missed that Gina was suicidal?

Perhaps because she wasn’t.

And had she truly been in love with me? I’d had patients fall for me before. It was a common phenomenon, and I’d always recognized it and taken care of it before it went too far. Perhaps I hadn’t noticed it with Gina because I hadn’t expected a woman to fall in love with me.

Or…perhaps I hadn’t noticed it with Gina because it wasn’t true.

Was it possible that the letter was a forgery?

And why a letter? Why hadn’t she e-mailed me? Nearly no one sent letters through the mail anymore…

An e-mail would be traceable. But an old-fashioned letter…

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I shuffled through the file again, looking for something, anything, with Gina’s handwriting on it. She had never sent me a check. Her therapy had been covered by her insurance.

Where could I find her handwriting?

I glanced at the letter again. Some words were blurred, and I honestly didn’t know if the wetness had come from my tears or Gina’s. The writing was shaky, though I hadn’t thought anything about that at the time.

But now, looking at the penmanship, I could see that she’d been trembling. Anyone about to commit suicide could have been trembling. But something else might have made her tremble as she wrote.

Fear.

Chapter Twenty–One

Jonah

I will have you.

I read the text again.

I had run the phone number through a simple search and come up empty-handed.

Clearly, the text had come from Brooke Bailey. The area code was from Iowa, where her fiancé, Nico Kostas, had told her he was an Iowa senator, although there was no record of him in either the United States Senate or the Iowa Senate.

Had Brooke been living in Iowa?

I decided to ignore the text. She was simply a needy woman, a model past her prime, who had stared death in the face and made it through. On top of that, her so-called fiancé had bailed on her and had probably tried to have her killed, although she didn’t know the latter, and unfortunately we couldn’t prove it anyway.

My stomach growled. It was getting close to dinnertime, but I didn’t want to wake Melanie. God knew she needed her rest. I shuffled into the kitchen and took a look in the cupboards. Melanie had laid in quite a few staples. I opened the refrigerator and took out an apple, biting into the crisp fruit. That would hold me over until I figured out what I was doing for dinner.

My phone buzzed again in my pocket. This time it was a text from Talon.

Marj came home from cooking class with a vat of spaghetti and meatballs. Come help us eat it. Ryan is coming over with a couple bottles of wine.

My stomach growled again. Spaghetti and meatballs sounded great, but I didn’t really want to run into Brooke again. Still, having my meal made for me would be a godsend. I would just have to wake up Melanie and tell her we were going.

I hadn’t yet told Talon what had happened to Melanie. I couldn’t leave her home alone. I’d have to wake her up and tell her we were going to Talon’s for dinner. She might not want to.

I texted Talon that I’d have to pass.

Are you sure? We need to discuss what to do about Felicia. I asked her to come over tomorrow morning for a talk with us.

Crap. My brother needed me, but so did Melanie. I had failed them both.

I sighed. It wouldn’t hurt to try. Maybe Melanie was hankering for spaghetti and meatballs, and she would want to go.

When I walked up to her door, I heard footsteps. Good, she was already awake. I knocked gently.

“Is that you, Jonah?”

“Yeah.”

“Come on in.”

I walked in, and she was taking a file out of her cabinet. She sat down on the floor and opened it.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m just looking through some files.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Yes. I have this strange feeling…”

“What is it?”

She looked at me, her green eyes glimmering. “What if Gina didn’t commit suicide? What if she was tied up, pushed into a garage, and left to die—like I was?”

The skin on the back of my neck began to burn. “Did you remember something?”

“She always told me the uncle who raped her was dead, but she could never tell me how he had died. I told her to ask her parents, but every time I asked her what they said, she said she had forgotten to ask.”

“I suppose it’s possible she just didn’t want to talk about her uncle to her parents.”

“Yes, that is definitely possible.” She bit her lip. “But Jonah, I know a lot about suicide. I’m writing a book about preventing suicide in teens. If someone was suicidal, I’d see the signs. I didn’t see them in Gina.”

Melanie was grasping at straws, clearly. Trying to convince herself. I didn’t know what to say to her.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

“We can look into it,” I said. “I’ll pay for the best investigators if you want.”

“Oh, no, I’m not after your money.”

I chuckled. “I know you’re not after my money, sweetheart. But I have money in abundance, and I want to help you through this. Right now, though, I’m starving. How about you?”