“Yesterday. A man came in. Good-looking, tall. Tattoos peeking beneath the cuffs of his sleeves.” Anika snuffed out her own cigarette and stood up. “You know, Tiffany’s type.”
No.
When Nora wrenched open the car door and threw herself inside, Ethan reached for her. “What’s wrong?” he asked, searching her face. “What happened?”
“Just drive.”
He steered away from Pine Hills but paused at the intersection, waiting for her to give him directions.
“I don’t know!” she shouted, casting about. “I don’t know where to go, I don’t know what to do . . .”
Ethan put on his blinker and turned on a side street. He drove halfway down the first block and pulled close to the curb, then put the vehicle in park. “Okay,” he said, swiveling to face her. “Tell me what happened. What’s wrong, Nora?”
“Tiffany came here a couple weeks ago.”
“So?”
Nora put her head in her hands and tugged her short hair as if trying to draw the truth from her own mind. She was putting the pieces together, filling in the blanks, but the situation was so surreal she didn’t know if she could trust herself.
“Talk to me,” Ethan said.
“She came with Everlee.”
“And?”
“And they met with Lorelei’s lawyer.”
“So?”
“Lorelei was worth a lot of money. Land rich. If I remember correctly, she had a hundred acres.”
Ethan tapped the steering wheel, calculating. “What’s an acre of farmland worth? Six thousand? Seven?”
“More.”
“That’s almost a million bucks.”
“Don’t forget the acreage and farmhouse.”
Ethan whistled low.
“But Lorelei didn’t know that Tiffany had a daughter. If she left everything to Tiffany—”
“And Tiffany was going to run—”
“Where would that leave Everlee?” Nora finished. What was Tiffany thinking? She had a false identity and enough money to disappear, but she went back to Key Lake all the same. And then she left Everlee behind. Why? Did she have any idea how much danger she had put her own daughter in? Herself? Lorelei’s land was no secret, and Nora felt like an idiot for not considering the possibility sooner. Of course Lorelei would leave everything to Tiffany. And of course it would leave Tiffany agonizingly vulnerable to a man like Donovan. Especially now that—Nora could only assume—Everlee was named in the will.
“She’s gone,” Nora whispered. “We’ll never find her.”
“What do you mean?”
“Tiffany wore a wig for the driver’s license photo. That’s why we found her hair in the sink at the farmhouse. She has a new name, a new identity . . .”
“You’re not kidding.”
“No, I’m not.”
“What’s her new name?”
But Nora shook her head. “I can’t tell you. A Jane Doe name. Not so generic that it’s obvious, but common enough that there are hundreds who share her name across North America. Maybe thousands.”
“Okay. So if she runs using her new identity, it’ll be hard to track her down.”
“Nearly impossible,” Nora moaned. “Especially if she doesn’t want to be found.”
“But if you had a plan, surely you knew where she was going.”
“Tiffany kept that detail to herself, but there were possibilities.” Nora ticked them off on her fingers. “New York City because: of course. Washington State because there was a poster of Mount Rainier in her childhood bedroom and she loved it. Arizona because Lorelei had taken her there one spring and she said the whole state smelled like orange blossoms. And Detroit because it’s where her mother died.”
Ethan pushed a hard breath through his nose.
“Impossible, right? And Tiffany’s nothing if not unreliable. For all I know she’s headed to Salt Lake City or Charleston or Orlando.”
“Her car?”
“She’ll switch the plates a couple times, sell it, buy a new one.”
“What about titles?”
Nora gave him a withering look. “You’re so naive.”
Ethan just stared at her. After a moment he said, cautiously: “What about her father?”
Everlee’s father. The great mystery, though, of course, Nora knew the truth. But that line on Everlee’s birth certificate matched her mother’s: blank. It would take a lot to prove what Nora knew to be true. Never mind the fact that she doubted anyone really wanted the truth. The closest thing Everlee had to a dad was Donovan Richter, and Nora was sure that he would stop at nothing to bring home his girl. He had so many reasons.
What was Tiffany thinking?
Nora turned away and studied the street outside her window, the neat homes that seemed to sit cheerfully behind the long stretches of idyllic sidewalks. Key Lake really was a pretty community, a slice of the American dream right down to the stars and stripes hanging from an eagle-topped flagpole attached to a pristine front porch. The annual Key Lake Fourth of July parade went right down a street like this, and she and Tiffany had gone every year, perching on the edge of the painted curb and pretending to hate it but secretly loving every minute. Especially the marching band. For some reason the marching band always made Nora’s heart feel swollen and tight.
“I love her,” Nora admitted quietly. The tears on her cheeks were sudden, unexpected, and she swallowed against the knot of hopelessness in her chest. “But Tiffany’s the opposite of dependable. If she gets spooked, she runs. I just never imagined that she’d leave Everlee behind. What are we going to do?”
Ethan was still for a long time. But when he spoke, a part of Nora wished he would have just kept his thoughts to himself. “Maybe we’re not supposed to find her,” he said carefully, slowly. “Maybe Everlee would be better off if we didn’t.”
The only reason his words hurt so much was because they were Nora’s dirty little secret. The idea that plagued her. She had spent the last seven years of her life fighting to keep Tiffany and Everlee together. What if, after all they had been through, she had been wrong? About everything?
Nora wasn’t sure she could ever forgive herself if the world they had created turned out to be a lie.
LIZ
“NORA IS IN KEY LAKE,” Quinn said, staring at the screen of her phone.
“What?” Liz looked up from the sink. “She can’t be.”
“She just texted me.”
Liz didn’t know what to say. How to feel. Such secrecy, and from the woman who had once been the very center of Liz’s universe. When Nora was born she was just over six pounds, but by the time Jack and Liz took her home from the hospital she’d lost a couple of ounces. One afternoon, on a lark, Liz wrapped her baby girl up in a blanket and tucked her in an old Louis Vuitton shoe box. She was a perfect fit. Downy head, petal pink cheeks, rosebud mouth pursed in a tiny pout. Her whole life contained in a small, neat rectangle. It was hard to believe that once upon a time, Liz had known all that there was to know about her daughter. The sprinkling of freckles across her shoulders, the way her nose crinkled when she was upset. Who her best friend was and how she liked her eggs cooked (scrambled with cheddar cheese) and that any problem could be fixed with a gingersnap cookie and a glass of cold milk. Who was this stranger? What had she done?