Sage Ballard sagged against the kitchen counter, her grip on the butcher’s knife growing slack. She stared at the floor, no longer able to look at the two men or the dainty toddler with the amber colored hair. All she could do was listen to her brother’s words looping through her thoughts, the internal volume slowly winding down, fading just like Jake had faded from her life almost half a decade earlier.

I lied…

“You’ll lose a toe,” Adler Turk growled, storming across the kitchen. His big hand closed around the knife’s handle right as it began to slide from her numb fingers.

Their gazes locked for less than a heartbeat. Eyes she’d thought black from a distance proved to be a deep blue-gray as dark as midnight. Emotion flared in their depths, but the exchange ended as soon as it began. Scowling, he turned away, slid the knife in the block next to the stove and returned to the room’s threshold. He stood there, thick arms folded across his broad chest, his back to Sage like she didn’t exist.

Because I don’t exist, she thought with a rough swallow. Bitter tears she refused to yield stung the lining of her nose. Somehow she’d gone from being her brother’s best friend to his dirty little secret.

He wasn’t the first man to do that to her—just the first one she loved.

“Why should I believe a word you say?” Adler asked with another tight growl as he glared at Jake.

“Addy!”

Sage jerked her head at Leah’s sharp cry. It was the first time she had heard the little girl speak. The toddler had kept her face buried against Jake’s chest at the Billings airport, her small form shaking as she clutched her father’s denim jacket. The shaking worsened to the point she was throwing up when they reached Willow Gap. When the vomiting continued inside the house, Jake rushed Leah to an emergency clinic half an hour away.

That’s why Adler found Sage alone in his sister’s kitchen.

“Addy, pwease!”

Sage looked at the niece she hadn’t known existed until a few weeks back. The little girl’s heart was breaking, but it wasn’t her father she was pleading with. Her tiny arms stretched toward Adler Turk.

The man cleared his throat, his hands falling to his sides. Sage couldn’t see his face, but she could see Jake’s. He offered a small nod at his brother-in-law then moved to sit on the side chair. Adler crossed the room, sat on the couch and folded Leah into his arms. She immediately fisted her hands in her uncle’s rust red hair before burying her face against his neck.

“Want mommy.”

Adler’s expression contorted. Sage felt her heart twist in sympathy. She knew Jake was hurting, but he had his mask firmly in place. It was an old mask, its chips filled in and painted over more times than Sage wanted to count. She knew its every contour because she had one just like it, kept it ready to be put on like a poncho tightly folded in a back pocket on a cloudy day.

Adler, though—everything the man felt in those moments surfaced and shimmered across the strong planes of his face. The full lips rolled inward to press a thin line. His Adam’s apple bobbed, the tendons of his neck pushing outward like thick, knotty vines. The eyes stretched wide, blinking as the nose broadened. Unshed tears caught the light, twinkling like distant stars against the midnight blue gaze.

Sage turned her back on the scene. Sliding her hand into water grown cold, she grasped the drain plug and pulled. A small whirlpool formed in the sink. She watched it spin, growing then shrinking until a great sucking sound took the last of the water away.

She dried her hand then put the remaining knives up before slinking from the kitchen and down the hall toward the guest room. Adler and Leah were oblivious to her leaving. Jake snagged her gaze for a second on her way out then looked back to where his daughter sought comfort in her uncle’s presence instead of her father’s.

Once in the hall, Sage stepped into the guest room and shut the door. The room looked more like it was for crafts than visitors. Fabric and other supplies filled the dresser drawers. The bed was a single. Someone had put sheets, a blanket, and pillows on it some time back. The same person had likely been the one to pile on oversized bags of the kind of polyester fill that formed the guts of teddy bears and seat cushions. Across from the bed, a sewing machine rested atop a folding table, with a desk chair flush against the table to form a narrow walk space in the small room.

Six weeks of Montana dust coated everything.

Sage pushed the bags of stuffing to the foot of the bed then sat on the mattress. Her back against the wall, she stared at the empty chair and the ghost of the woman who would never sit in it again. Exhaustion clawed at her shoulders, dragged them lower as she fought to keep her head up. The flight from Baltimore had turned into a cramped thirteen-hour ordeal that included lost luggage and an unexpected stopover. Before that, she hadn’t slept much since Jake’s midnight call turned her world upside down.

Now that she had found him, Sage felt like she would lose her brother for another five years if she so much as blinked. Maybe she would lose him forever.

Slowly her eyes drifted shut. Her body remained upright even as her brain folded. Jake found her like that a little while later, the sun freshly up.

Squinting from all the light entering the room, Sage stared at him.

“Leah?” she whispered.

“Sleeping,” he answered with the same hushed tones.

Jake stepped into the hall, leaving the door to the guest room open. Sage didn’t know if his failure to shut the door was an invitation to follow or lazy indifference.

Hoping for the best, she padded after him.

Standing in front of the sink, Jake poured water into a pan then placed it on the stove. Opening a cupboard, he pulled down a jar of instant coffee and a box of tea bags. He closed the door gently, opened another and removed two mugs. Sage walked past him to the utility room that opened onto the backyard. The stacked washer/dryer unit lay dormant against one wall. She opened the top and pulled out yesterday’s outfit, a pair of dress slacks, panties, nylons and a white georgette blouse.

Except for her laptop, cell phone and purse, everything else she had brought on the trip was stuck someplace between Baltimore and the Billings airport.

Standing on tiptoe, she grabbed the low-heeled flats she had placed atop the dryer.

“Water’s ready,” Jake said, his voice barely reaching her from a few feet away.

She put the clothes and shoes on the work counter shoved against the opposite wall and returned to the kitchen. Jake stood there with the jar of coffee in one hand and a teabag in the other.

“Milk and sugar?” she asked.

He tilted his chin at the refrigerator door before dropping it to point at a canister next to the stove.

“I’ll have tea then.”

Opening the refrigerator for the milk, she paused. The interior was filled with sealed containers. She spotted a casserole with green beans, lasagna, something that looked like dumplings, one with beef stew.

Jake reached past Sage and grabbed the milk carton. “People keep bringing stuff by. Dawn has a big family.”

“I know. I read the obituary.”

The words came out in a soft, yet shredding, bite. Part of her wanted to sink her teeth deeper and shake her brother until he broke.

“You wrote that obituary, didn’t you? Not her mom or overbearing big brother—you.”

Lips pressed together, Jake handed over the mug of hot water, the tea bag already steeping. She started adding sugar, her mind turning over the words that had, after days of searching online, finally revealed Jake’s location in Willow Gap.

With deepest sorrows, the Turk family announces the death of its beloved daughter Dawn, survived by her husband Jake, daughter Leah, mother Lindy Turk, her brothers...

Losing count of how many spoons of sugar she’d already put into the tea, Sage gave the liquid an angry swish then added milk.

“You intentionally wrote it in a way I wouldn’t be able to find you.”

Jake didn’t reply right immediately. He took a slow sip of the coffee, his gaze remaining on the cup. “I wrote it so no one could find me.”

“I’m the only one still looking.”

Dumping the tea untouched, she returned to the utility room and smoothed out the dress slacks. They were manufactured to avoid wrinkling, but she had set them to drying before starting the dishes. From there, everything had gone from really bad to basically the worst it could possibly be with the arrival of Adler Turk.

“You called me in the middle of the night—”

“I shouldn’t have called you at all.”

She glanced through the doorway but he wouldn’t meet her gaze. His meaning was clear either way. Saying that he shouldn’t have called at all meant he was sorry she had shown up. Of course, that had been clear from the contents of the call.

“For five years, I haven’t changed my number. I’ve kept it and my address listed every time I moved. I answered every call with the caller ID blocked because maybe, just maybe, it was from you.”

Drawing a deep breath, Sage reminded herself that Leah was sleeping down the hall. The last thing she wanted to do was bring any more stress to that precious little girl.

Keeping her voice low, she stepped up close to her brother, the coffee cup shielding him from full contact.

“You know what that means, right?”

A brief nod.

“Don’t give me that,” she snapped. “It deserves more than some nod. It means the people who might want to find you were ALWAYS able to find me.”

He shrugged, the simple gesture igniting a seething fury in Sage’s chest.

“How was my persistence rewarded?” she asked. “I get an incoherent midnight call from you.”

She’s dead…

That’s what he had said, his voice breaking as Sage brushed the cobwebs from her mind and reached for the lamp by her bed.

A certain “she,” came to mind, but Sage doubted they would be thinking about the same woman. After a minute of coaxing on her end and silence on his, Jake finally said it was his wife. No name, just “my wife.” Then everything became even more bewildering and frustrating.

They’re going to take her from me.

She could only pull two more words from her brother before he hung up.

My daughter.

His call launched a twenty-four hour Googling marathon that only ended when Sage collapsed in exhaustion on her living room floor.

She tried obituary searches with her brother’s name and the current year. The only thing she discovered with those parameters was that there were quite a few “Ballard Funeral Homes” across the country, resulting in more than three hundred thousand hits on her search results. That number was effectively doubled because some hits were for currently cached pages and pages where the data she was looking for couldn’t be found with a simple “find” command because of the length of the page and the need for the data to refresh.

Day-by-day, she continued refining her search. She dropped the obituary angle and focused on news reports for variations of death, both the word and the means of achieving a deceased state. Jake’s broken voice suggested more than just the grief of losing a wife. It suggested a sharp, sudden shock—a death wholly unexpected. So Sage looked for fires, murders, car accidents, drownings and everything else that included a young woman with the last name of Ballard who had died within eight weeks before Jake’s call.

Finally, less than seventy-two hours from her standing there in the kitchen with her brother hiding behind his cup of coffee, Sage had found an accident report in the Billings Gazette about a father and daughter who had died in an early morning accident on their way back from some kind of cattle conference. The father was Brody Turk, the daughter was Dawn Ballard.

Even then, she couldn’t find Dawn Ballard’s obituary, not until she resorted to Jake’s mindset and looked for Dawn under her maiden name. And there it was, “survived by her husband Jake…”

“So, what now?” Sage asked, turning to the sink and rinsing her cup. “Am I supposed to go back to never being born?”

“I don’t think you can,” Jake monotoned. “Only thing worse than the Turks finding out I have a sister is you disappearing right afterward.”

“Yeah,” Sage nodded, heart shrinking with the knowledge that she was back to existing for someone else’s convenience. “Guess that means I’m staying.”