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“I’m busy.” She started closing the door.

“Okay. Thanks.”

The door closed and I turned away. I wasn’t convinced that Jordan wasn’t with Patrick.

THIRTY-ONE

KEITH

Patrick had never shown signs of being the game-playing, manipulative type, but I was sure his disappearance was a bit of both. What he did strike me as, was a guy with a one-track mind. I’d always thought that about him. I’d always had the sense his identity was buried under the shine of heroism he’d adopted in his career. Firefighters were auto-heroes, even if they didn’t do anything heroic. It was all a result of nine-eleven.

It’s a fair assessment. The people who ran into those towers, unconcerned for their own lives, were heroic beyond anything I would ever be, no matter what I did with my life. And firefighters absolutely save lives. Probably every single day. But Patrick seemed to inject heroism into his personality, as if that was all there was to him—a superhero to challenge the fictional ones.

He needed everyone to see him as a hero. All the effing time.

The minute someone needed anything, that guy was out the door and into his truck, racing off to help people with the smallest things—fixing a leaky sprinkler, picking up takeout for someone who was recovering from surgery, showing neighbors how to make their homes safe from accidents and fire to mitigate the risks he liked to quote—Over one hundred thousand people die from injuries in their home every year. That was his favorite. But he also had stats about drowning, home invasion, and other home accidents.

According to Samantha, all their neighbors thought he was a hero. The nicest guy on the block. I knew their friends believed this too. We’d been to enough parties at their house, and I’d listened to the Patrick praise parade more often than I would have liked.

I wasn’t jealous of the guy for being a so-called man’s man. I absolutely did not envy his career. I received enormous satisfaction practicing law. I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else. And I would continue to reap that satisfaction into my seventies. Patrick would be done by the age of fifty. I had more financial upside. He would never have owned a vacation home if it weren’t for Emily’s inheritance and my profit-sharing at the law firm.

Now, I couldn’t help wonder if he was manipulating us in order to beef up his heroism credentials.

It was killing him that the three of us, and circumstances, had prevented him from reporting the murder in our backyard. He’d been continuously agitated since the moment we saw that body floating in the pool. It was an experience so shocking, and so embedded into my nervous system, I found the memory of that body floating in pristine blue water invading my own thoughts at the most unexpected times.

There was no other way to explain his extended hiking trip, particularly his five a.m. departure, or whatever absurd time he’d left the house, creeping around in the pre-dawn light. He wanted us to worry.

He was trying to force us to call the sheriff to report him missing. Once we did that, the whole story would come out. He’d decided he couldn’t persuade us verbally, couldn’t pressure us with his altruistic belief that a dead stranger was everyone’s responsibility. At some point, he’d come up with the idea that disappearing would force our hand.

I refused to let him manipulate me into that game. First, because I could see through it, but also because I was too fixated on the changes in Emily’s behavior to get caught up in Patrick’s desire for justice. It’s not instinctive or easy to think about justice and the big picture when your small picture is fading and changing shape like there’s some AI bot running the show, morphing the picture right before your eyes.

I wasn’t in the mood to try to prove myself innocent for the second time in my life. And this was far worse than that day I was taken to the police station where I was harassed and intimidated and verbally condemned after trying to do the right thing. It wasn’t as if I lost my moral compass that day. It wasn’t as if I’d become a sociopath—not that turning into a sociopath is something that happens after one bad experience with humanity. I just didn’t see the need to go out of my way for people I didn’t know. Obviously, I did go above and beyond for my wife, our friends, and in my law practice. But for strangers, or people I knew only in passing like that girl screaming for help, then turning on me, I learned that day to mind my own business.

I wasn’t going to waste my life trying to prove to some sheriff’s deputy that I didn’t know the guy floating in our pool and that I had no idea how he’d ended up there. I needed to focus on reconnecting with Emily.

This trip had turned into a nightmare. I wished we’d never come. At least not right now, not until things were settled between Emily and me. It’s never a good idea to work things out with your partner when other people are listening, watching. If we’d come up to the mountains by ourselves, it would have been perfect. But not with Em’s best friend and her do-gooder husband.

My brother had told me it was a mistake to buy property with friends.

Any change in your friendship will create financial issues with the property. Guaranteed. Matt always guaranteed his opinions, his advice. It was the big brother in him.

Already, with barely three days at our so-called dream vacation house, my brother was being proven right. Patrick was trying to force us to do what he wanted because he could never just let things be. Well I wasn’t going to let him win. If he wanted to hide in the forest until Samantha lost her mind, he could have at it.

All I had to do was make sure Samantha didn’t report him missing. We’d smoke the guy out by being more stubborn than he was.

THIRTY-TWO

EMILY

Watching Samantha worry about Patrick was painful. I could see her resisting reporting him missing, because that meant her fears might be true, but I could see the fear in her eyes. She was immobilized—curled up on the couch, hugging her legs to her chest. Her expression was a blank stare into nothingness. But I knew her mind was not empty. It was whirling with imagined disasters, asking herself if she should be scared he was already dead.

I made two cups of tea and brought them into the living room. She smiled at the tea I placed on the table in front of her, but she didn’t thank me or pick it up.

We sat in silence for quite a while.

“Emily!” I turned at the sound of Keith’s voice behind me, hard and cold.

I hadn’t heard him enter the room. Maybe I’d been swept away as fully as Samantha was by frightened thoughts and speculation.