Epilogue
The drone of the sheriff’s station was comfortingly dull. The sound of computers buzzing, phones chirping now and then, and the low murmur of conversation. Lisa Gray sat at her desk, halfway through a stale cup of coffee, pretending to care about the number of unopened emails on her screen.
There was a comfort in slipping back into what was familiar.
She decided that she liked predictability—she knew the sound her chair made when she swiveled, how lukewarm the coffee that dribbled out of the machine was, and how the receptionist—an old lady civilian volunteer—would hum the same tune every morning.
Like a warm blanket after a storm.
But something was different. The picture of her and Jim she kept on her desk was missing. Her entire being was fragmented. There was the Lisa who was the wife of a murderer, and there was the Lisa who showed up at work.
The first day she’d arrived all eyes had been drawn in her direction, their gazes sticky and stinging. She’d left early with tears bubbling in the back of her throat. But the next day, she showed up again. It was the only life she knew.
These boring brown walls, the slow Internet, and sullen, gray skies.
Across from her, Deputy Toby cracked sunflower seeds between his teeth and let the husks fall into a paper cup.
“You see that raccoon video I sent you?” he asked, not looking up.
Lisa didn’t even pause in her typing. “The one where it steals the pizza?”
“Yeah. Clever little bastard.”
“They’re getting bolder,” she said, sipping her coffee. “Next thing you know, they’re gonna want our badges.”
Toby chuckled, feet up on his desk. “Why are you still here, Lisa?”
“What do you mean?”
His chipper demeanor dimmed. “You helped crack open a big case with the FBI. And this county won’t let you forget the scandal. We’re small-town people.”
She smiled faintly, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “I’m fine, Toby. This is my home. Why should I uproot everything when I did nothing wrong?”
The revelation had clogged her senses. She was cloudy and distracted.
Maybe she was making a mistake by staying.
Maybe she wasn’t thinking straight anymore.
These past few days in particular, Jim’s betrayal was sitting inside her stomach like a ball of gunk.
She would wake up in the middle of the night, sweating and nauseated.
But this morning, her mind whispered something to her.
Her hand drifted to her stomach in a quick, unconscious motion before she stood.
“Back in a sec,” she said, grabbing her phone and heading down the hall.
The bathroom was cold, the kind of cold only bad lighting and old tile could make worse. She locked the stall and pulled the small pharmacy bag from inside her jacket.
Her fingers moved quickly. The box crinkled open and the test unwrapped. She stared at it for a second longer than she needed to—then did what she came to do.
Time stretched while she waited and exited the stall. She leaned against the sink, arms crossed, watching the second hand of her watch tick by.
Finally, she looked down.
Two lines.
Her breath caught, stuck somewhere between her chest and throat. For a second, everything stopped moving, like the world had been wrapped in glass. A single breath and everything would come crashing down.
She turned to the mirror.
Her reflection stared back, stunned and pale. Awkwardness flared, steeling into full-blown panic. She turned on the tap and splashed cold water over her face.
The one thing she’d wanted for years and now she had it. Did she even want this anymore? What the hell was she supposed to do now?
A knock sounded at the door.
“You fall in or what?” Toby joked.
She closed her eyes for a beat. Her voice cracked. “I don’t know.”
The crystal-clear clarity came to Dawn one rainy morning.
It was a soft, persistent patter against the windows.
Outside in the gardens, she could see her daughter’s grave.
The house had been built in such a way that it was visible from every window.
She had spent years drowning in the grief of living without her daughter.
That’s why she had never moved, why she had kept the view of her grave.
She wanted to stare her pain right in the face to defeat it.
But over the years, she had been buried deep under it.
When David walked into the kitchen, she was nursing a hot tea. “She was always jealous of you.”
David froze in his tracks. Dawn had never talked about her to him. It was a poisonous subject that percolated between them. “Why?”
“Because I gave you more attention. You were my firstborn. That’s the thing about that first child.
Love is equal, but the impact isn’t. Your first child changes you and the rest just grow from what you’ve already become.
” She looked up at him. Her eyes were red-rimmed, exhausted.
“And then losing your child destroys you.”
He winced like she’d slapped him. “Mother, you have no idea the guilt I carry?—”
“I know, my sweet child.” He almost reeled from her softness.
It was a side to her that he hadn’t seen in decades.
“I used to only think about you and your future, and I neglected her and minimized her achievements. And now I’ve lived the majority of my life only thinking about her and trying to find my way back to who I was.
But I never will. I have accepted that.”
A long silence hung between them. Thunder rolled in the distance.
“I didn’t just lose a sister that day. I lost a mother too.” David sat next to her, staring out the window.
“When did we start hating each other so much, David?”
He scoffed. “We don’t hate each other, Mother. We’re just angry. All the time.”
Dawn placed the bottle of her pills silently on the counter between them. She didn’t look at David but heard his breath hitch.
Another silence stretched—this time it made her skin crawl, like something ancient was shifting between them.
“I’ve hated you,” she admitted at last. “Every goddamn day. But not because you failed her. I hated you because you reminded me that I failed her too.”
“You’ve put me down. Every single opportunity you reminded me that I wasn’t good enough and that the purpose of my life was to bear your wrath and be punished for being negligent that one night.”
“And so you decided to slowly kill your own mother.” Her voice cracked and her eyes stung with tears.
His nose turned red as he sniffled, tears running down unchecked. “I… I don’t know, Mother. I’m sorry. I didn’t know what I was thinking. I didn’t know anything anymore.”
She reached across the table, her fingers brushing against his hand.
For a second, the years melted away, and she was just a mother holding on to her boy.
“We’ve forgotten the love we had, David.
We have felt nothing but pain,” she said, softly, “but I can’t carry it anymore. I’m tired of the weight.”
David’s shoulders shook. He bit back a sob and covered his face with one hand. She let him wallow in it. She let both of them wallow in it. She was tired of blotting it out. Somewhere she was still holding on to David, that’s why she was punishing him by trying to control him.
She could either forgive him or she had to let him go. There was no other way to overcome the pain that haunted her.
Slowly, she pulled her hand away. Her voice came out cold and sharp. “I’ve accepted I can’t forgive you, David. I never will.”
He looked up, confused. “What?”
She stood up. Her small frame seemed to fill the room now. “I know what you’ve been doing. Adam reached out to me and made a deal. Inside scoop on our monumentally messed-up family in exchange for not helping you bring down my company.”
His eyes grew large and his body went rigid. “Mother…”
A throng of men in suits and jackets blasted inside the room.
The man leading the charge walked straight up to David.
“David Harrington, you’re under arrest for your involvement in a scheme to manipulate the stock price of a publicly traded company.
You are being charged with market manipulation, securities fraud, and conspiracy to commit fraud in violation of federal law. ”
Dawn tuned out the FBI agent as he recited David his Miranda rights. She turned her back on her son as he was dragged away and out of her life for good.
Now it was just her and her daughter.
It wasn’t often that Zoe visited Rachel’s grave.
In true Rachel fashion, her mother had wanted to be buried somewhere where it rained and stormed often.
Zoe knew her mother had roots in Washington State.
She also wondered how the hell they were related when they had nothing in common—except for their patience for tolerating Gina.
The sky hung low and heavy, a thick sheet of gray that pressed down like a weight. Water pooled in uneven patches along the winding cemetery path, reflecting the bare trees that stood like brittle skeletons brushing against the dull afternoon light.
She wrapped her coat around her, moving deliberately through the rows of headstones.
Her boots sank slightly into the wet soil.
Her stomach was still tender. The stitches that held together her skin throbbed and stretched with every step she took.
In Zoe’s time with the FBI, she had never once been shot.
Now that a hole that been drilled through her stomach, she felt like a part of her was gone forever.
A roll of thunder and it started to drizzle. Names, dates, etched words of remembrance blurred under the streaks of water running down the marble like old tears. When she reached a small, plain headstone wedged between two more elaborate stones, her feet stopped moving.
Her breath stuck in her throat. Her eyes fixed on a bouquet of yellow roses resting against Rachel’s headstone.
Who was here?
She looked around, but the cemetery was empty.
Just rows and rows of stone on a green carpet, not a single shadow in sight on this rainy day.
Yellow roses were Rachel’s favorite flower.
Who would visit Rachel? Gina was back in Vermont and Rachel didn’t have any other family or friends—certainly no one who knew she was buried in Lakemore.
“Who’s there?” she called out, her voice bouncing back to her. The only reply was the wind, shifting, moving, whispering through the empty spaces.
Her breath fogged as she bent down to pick up the bouquet; the flowers were now soaked in rainwater. There was no card. But there was something else.
Origami. A yellow paper folded into the shape of a dove, inconspicuous and blending with the roses.
She pulled it out and opened it.
Her heart thundered inside her chest.
Viper is coming for you.
* * *
Were you totally gripped by Zoe Storm’s second case in Run for Her Life ? Then you’ll love the Detective Mackenzie Price series by Ruhi Choudhary. Get the first book in the series, Our Daughter’s Bones , for free!
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