Lucas Arden saw Nora before he understood what he was seeing.
The black SUV was moving through Oregon wine country beneath a hard August sun when Celeste Vaughn suddenly leaned forward in the passenger seat.
“Lucas, stop.”
He glanced at her.
“What?”
“Stop the car.
Look.”
He braked near the shoulder, tires scattering gravel.
Thirty yards behind them, a woman was walking beside the road with a grocery bag filled with empty bottles hanging from one wrist.
Two babies were strapped against her chest.
Lucas’s hands went cold.
Nora.
His former wife looked thinner than she had a year earlier.
Her dark blond hair was tied into a loose knot, her faded gray shirt damp around the collar.
Dust covered her sandals.
One of the infants slept beneath a knitted cap while the other blinked sleepily toward the road.
Lucas had spent eleven months convincing himself he no longer cared where Nora lived or what became of her.
The lie collapsed in one second.
Celeste lowered her window.
“Nora!”
Nora stopped.
Her expression changed when she recognized the SUV.
Celeste gave a soft laugh.
“I almost didn’t recognize you.”
Lucas looked at Celeste.
There was cruelty in her tone he had somehow ignored for years.
Nora said nothing.
Then the larger baby turned his head.
Sunlight touched a patch of pale blond hair above his forehead.
Lucas felt the air leave his lungs.
The Arden men had carried that strange silver-blond coloring for three generations.
Lucas had been teased about it in school.
His father, Theodore, had joked that it made every Arden baby look eighty years old.
Celeste noticed Lucas staring.
Her fingers tightened around her purse.
“Don’t start inventing things,” she murmured.
Then she reached inside, pulled out a fifty-dollar bill and tossed it through the open window.
It fluttered into the dirt beside Nora.
“For formula,” Celeste called.
“You look like you need it.”
Nora’s eyes moved to the bill.
Then to Celeste.
Finally, she looked at Lucas.
The absence of anger on her face hurt more than a scream would have.
“They’re not hungry,” Nora said.
The smaller baby whimpered.
She immediately placed a protective hand against his back.
“It’s all right, Theo.”
Lucas’s heart seemed to stop.
Theo.
His father’s name.
Nora adjusted the carrier and continued walking.
Celeste rolled up her window.
“That was depressing.
Drive.”
Lucas did.
But he watched Nora disappear in the mirror.
A year earlier, he had loved her enough to believe he knew every expression on her face.
Then, in less than one week, that trust had been destroyed.
First, Lucas’s foundation controller discovered $180,000 in suspicious payments made to an outside consulting company.
The payment authorizations appeared to come from Nora’s credentials.
Then anonymous photographs arrived showing Nora inside Portland’s Halcyon Hotel with an unfamiliar man.
In one image, the man’s hand was near hers across a table.
In another, he appeared to be leaning toward her.
Nora denied having an affair.
Lucas wanted to believe her.
Then came the sapphire brooch.
The brooch had belonged to Lucas’s grandmother and had vanished from a locked cabinet after a family dinner.
Celeste suggested checking the house systematically before involving the police.
Security found it inside the lining of Nora’s winter coat.
That night Lucas confronted his wife in the
