Page 51 of Mirror Image

I laugh so hard I nearly choke on my sandwich. “Please tell me you didn’t actually take that one.”

“I did better than that,” Ruth says. “I won.”

I shake my head, grinning. “Still Ruthless.”

“Always,” she replies, lifting her coffee in a toast. “But only for the greater good—and the greater payout.”

I wipe my fingers, still smiling. “Speaking of payouts . . . Gabe says to tell you our guest room’s waiting if you ever make it up to New York again. He’s anxious to win back his three hundred.”

Ruth snorts into her coffee. “Three hundred? Please. It was five—and I’d love to see him try.”

“Between the two of you, I’ll have to start charging admission.”

She chuckles, then fixes me with that shrewd lawyer’s gaze again.

“Have you been by the cemetery?”

I pause, still chewing. “I drove by.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“It’s as close as I can get for now.”

“You sure about that?” she asks, her tone softening. “You keep skirting around it, like maybe distance will make it disappear. It won’t. The only way out is through.”

I trace a fingertip through a smear of mustard on my plate. “Maybe someday.”

“Someday’s a start,” she says, letting it go.

My phone buzzes on the table. I glance down, expecting Gabe—or maybe Stef—but it’s neither.

Mary is ready to see you.—DK

I don’t recognize the number with the 301 area code, but I only know one person with those initials. David Kellogg.

Ruth watches me. “Work?”

“Something like that,” I reply even as I’m typing back.

Give me twenty minutes.

Then I hit send before I can overthink it.

Ruth tilts her head, reading my expression. “Trouble?”

“Maybe,” I say, gathering my things. I take the last bites of my sandwich, unwilling to leave a single crumb behind. “But at least this time, it’s not mine.”

She gives me that lawyer’s smile—the one that’s half encouragement, half warning. “Let’s hope it stays that way.”

I drop a few bills on the table and grab my bag. “Yeah. But sometimes helping someone else find their way out is the only way to prove you still can.”

And with that, I step back into the Miami heat—toward another woman’s ghosts, and maybe a chance to make peace with my own.

Chapter Eighteen

Mary

Four and a half years ago