Page 23 of One Second After Another

One less lie between them.

Didn’t that count for anything?

“I just need a place to start, and I can find her again—go from there,” Luca muttered more to himself than to Naz.

“You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?”

Naz pushed his chair back just far enough that he could open a drawer in his desk. Yanking out a newspaper, he slapped it to the top of the desk and nodded at Luca to take a look. “That right there—published today in the Times.”

Luca’s confusion only lasted as long as it took him to get the newspaper in his hands. Naz already had the paper open and folded to the story on the third page—an entire article dedicated to exposing Allegra Hatheway as Allegra Dunsworth. Maybe exposing wasn’t the right word as the journalist simply connected the dots of the woman’s history, her former husband’s arrest for child pornography, and his subsequent death. There was a suggestion that the charges facing Preston Dunsworth had only scratched the surface, the journalist had written in black and white. Holding back only a bit.

But it was enough, he knew.

Enough to do damage. To ruin a reputation. To fuck shit up for certain people—like Allegra. Or even her current fiancé who certainly couldn’t afford a scandal of this kind with his high profile nature and politics in the way.

“What are the chances,” Naz asked, “that story dropped now just because?”

Luca glanced up from the page, meeting his friend’s stare. “I don’t believe in coincidences like that.”

“Me, either. And if this is coming out, chances are, it’s not going to be the last thing we see on the topic.”

Right.

“Penny is feeding information to the papers.”

Or to someone.

It would have to be her.

Who else would—

“Maybe she’s giving people a place to start looking because then she controls where everyone else is while she’s somewhere else,” Luca murmured.

Naz shrugged. “It’s smart.”

But messy.

And now Luca needed to figure out how to look through any distractions Penny put out to find what she didn’t want him to.

Luca could tell Naz was still pissed at him. Since they were kids, nothing had been off-limits between the two. He didn’t wonder why his friend felt the way he did. “I know you’ve still got shit to say to me about all of this,” he told Naz, “but we can get back to that at another time. Because right now, I’m running out of time to find Penny. If someone else finds her before I do ... listen, nothing good is going to come from that, man.”

Naz sighed harshly. “She’s not the same, is she?”

“It’s been five years, Naz.”

“I know, but ... she’s not the same, is she?”

Luca thought about that.

And what he could say.

Penny was ...

Better.

Amazing.