Page 3 of One Step After Another

But wasn’t that the point of ghosts?

They didn’t exist.

They couldn’t be seen.

Thing was—Penny Dunsworth wasn’t a ghost. Living, breathing ... heart beating. She was just as real as him or anyone else in the world. She was simply harder to find.

Luca knew her once. So had his friends ... family. The young woman they invited into their world and life, someone they bent over backward to help and protect, until she just up and disappeared one day.

For no reason.

With no trace.

They wanted to know why—or rather, Luca’s friend did. Nazio and his wife couldn’t accept that Penny left on her own. Not considering her history and what led up to her eventual disappearance. Luca wasn’t inclined to believe it either which was why he kept looking.

Even when Penny, a ghost of what they knew her to be, made it particularly hard. She couldn’t hide everything. Or the people she worked for couldn’t, anyway. Which was how he found himself at the hotel. And her supposed connection to an organization based in Nevada known only as The League.

He couldn’t confirm it. That was the kind of the point, he suspected. Not that it stopped him.

Finding the unfindable certainly made Luca a good living, and it kept his head above water. It gave him something to do when his leads on Penny ran dry, and he had to wait for something else to pop up.

But that flash of pin-straight black hair under a large brimmed hat just beyond the entrance of the hotel said his lead on her was currently red-hot. In five years, the closest he had ever been to coming face to face with Penny Dunsworth had been ... never. He was always minutes too late, or entirely off the mark.

He wasn’t about to let this chance slip through his fingers. He owed it to his friends to find the woman they had taken in as one of their own. So they could finally know why.

Right?

Time to get to work.