“Now, though?” she asks.

It’s all she can manage to say, and when she sees Luke’s face fall, her heart lurches and she actually brings one hand to her mouth, as if her words have left a stain there she should wipe way.

“When?” he asks softly. Her response knocked the wind out of him. “When we retire? When we have a normal life again? We didn’t pick normal, did we? That’s kind of why I picked you. I’ve never wanted normal. I’ve always wanted a fight, as long as it’s a good fight.”

“So I’m a fight?” she asks, voice trembling.

“No. We fight the dark together. Always. And I’ll go wherever the fight takes us, as long as I get to go with you, Charlotte Rowe.”

“Luke . . .”

He moves to her, hesitantly at first. Then when she starts to cry, he takes her in his arms gently, and she knows as she says his name again and again that what she’s really saying is life, because that’s what he is and that’s what this proposal is, and that’s why she has no choice but to say yes.

45

Tulsa, Oklahoma

Zoey Long passes her sister’s phone back so she can swipe through the photos from her vacation and Zoey can hide how badly her hands are shaking by clenching them between her knees under the table. Only once since returning home has she taken one of the pills her new friends have given her for moments like these. She speaks to the psychiatrist they’ve provided for her every night, a gentle, patient woman who’s warned her that for the foreseeable future even basic uncomfortable emotions will feel coated in a layer of tremor-inducing anxiety.

No wonder her hands are shaking. She’s been lying to her sister. Yes, she actually is leaving town on a plane later tonight, but the reason she gave for the trip is a fiction.

For the time being, she can only pretend to be enamored by Rachel’s Paris photos. The truth is, the story Rachel tells for each picture goes in one of Zoey’s ears and out the other.

She brings her bottle to her mouth. A mistake. Rachel looks up from her phone and goes still. Her hand must have shaken visibly enough for her sister to see.

“Oh, honey, is it the producer? Are you nervous?”

“Kinda, yeah. I feel bad.”

“About what?”

“Quitting on Dr. Keables the way I did.”

“Aw, fuck that, gurl. You got an opportunity. Jump on that shit. I don’t want to see my little sister working in a dentist’s office for the rest of her life. Not when she’s as talented as you.”

On the television above the bar, she glimpses the helicopter footage of Marjorie Payne’s ranch that’s now familiar to just about everyone in the country. Zoey closes her eyes, looks to the high-top table between them.

“Are you following this shit?” Rachel says. “My friend Tom is all about the Reddit thread on this one, and he thinks the woman felt so guilty one day she went out there and tried to dig up all the bodies herself and realized she couldn’t do it, so she invited the guys over who helped her and killed them all. Me, I think they did it together, like as a suicide pact or something.”

They definitely died together, Zoey thinks. And everything inside of her wants to tell her sister how close she came to being one of those bodies they discovered partially encased in concrete, but her new friends would hate that.

And her new friends are scary.

“Sorry,” Rachel says when she sees the expression on her face. “I thought you were all about that true crime stuff.”

“I’m kind of losing my taste for it, to be honest.”

“You’re not going to watch Dateline with me anymore?”

“Rachel, I will watch anything you want.”

“OK, good. Don’t go soft on me just ’cause you’re writing a bunch of romance now. How long are you going to be out there anyway?”

“A couple weeks, at first. But I’ll be back and forth. We’re going to work on putting a pilot script together and then a treatment for a whole series. So he wants me to stay out there until the materials are ready to go to studios and networks. Then we’ll probably have a bunch of pitch meetings, maybe meet with showrunners. So it’s going to be a while.”

“And you’re sure this guy’s not creepy? Hollywood seems creepy right now.”

Not the kind of creepy you’re thinking of, sis.

“Listen, Rachel, there’s something I really want to say to you.”

“Sure.”

“Do you remember that day at the mall when we were little and that guy dressed up as a security guard—”

“Oh, Zoey, you really got to stop beating yourself up about that. We were—”

“I know, I know. I mean, I know every time I bring it up I say that . . . But I had a moment of thinking about it recently . . .” Several tears slip free before she’s even aware they’ve filled her eyes. A moment when I thought I’d never see you again.

“Honey, are you OK?”

“I’m fine. I just . . . I’m having a moment, you know. The TV thing, it’s really exciting. And it’s just got me reflecting about a lot of stuff. And I started thinking about what you did at the mall that day, and I just thought it was so important. What you did. The way you spoke up. And it occurred to me that I’d never said what I should really say about it.”

“What’s that?”

“Thank you.”

Rachel’s not a big crier, but for some reason this little moment brings tears to her eyes as well, and Zoey thinks, Good. She’ll just think her sister’s being a big softie. And I am, but she’s got no idea why. The fact that an old photograph of Marjorie Payne has just filled the television hanging over the bar only makes it all the more surreal. That and the Graydon security guard who followed them here. He’s studying Zoey from across the bar with a concerned look. Sure, there’s probably sympathy in it, but she’s willing to bet he’s more concerned she might be spilling secrets about what she really went through while her sister was gallivanting down the Champs-Élysées with her husband.

Shedding a few tears was apparently the tension release she needed. For the rest of Rachel’s Paris stories she manages to act like the sister she was before Rachel left.

And suddenly, just sitting there, listening to Rachel talk fills her with gratitude so total she’s afraid she’ll start crying again. She’d lost her faith in that pit, came to believe that a horrible, violent death was only minutes away. And now, here she is. Every giggle and joke and curse word out of her sister’s mouth is a gift. And why should it end with Rachel? Colors. Smells. Music. All of it is a gift; she came so close to having it all pulled away.

And maybe this realization will help her accept the fact that while she wasn’t exactly thrilled by the prospect of going back to work, her new friends didn’t suggest that she quit her job; they instructed her to. And a producer isn’t flying her to the West Coast, even though he has an amazing website complete with a dummy phone number and contact email addresses, all of which appeared overnight. And she didn’t ask for the security guards that have been following her ever since she left Marjorie Payne’s ranch; they just never left.

Zoey hugs her sister long and hard as they wait for their Ubers outside the bar. But Rachel’s got no idea where Zoey’s really headed once she steps into hers. It’s not Tulsa International like she said. Instead, after she picks up her bags and her cat from her apartment, she’ll head to a private airfield—and then from there to a destination that seems shrouded in mystery even though she’s heard the name a million times before.