“I’m going to go.”
“You’ll stay. You’ll listen. See, I had to ask myself, my cynical self, why would someone give money to my family this way? If you wanted to help them out, you could just donate to the fund that was set up after the accident. No, whoever is coming in the middle of the night and leaving money is up to something else. And what could that be?” She snapped her fingers. “Guilt. That’s the only explanation. Someone with a lot of guilt. A lot. Now, your friend Aaron, the one who went to prison, he’s done his time. And his life on the outside can’t be that great. He couldn’t just go around like Santa, leaving goodies for a struggling family.” She shook her head, a look of amusement on her face. “And your friend, the other one? The rich guy? What’s his name?”
“Leave my friends out of it.”
“One look at him and you can see he wouldn’t give his money to somebody. He’s a jerk through and through. He looks like the type to have an accident. Not the type to care if anyone got hurt. And not the type to feel guilt.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “I’m just trying to help. You can’t conclude anything from my gesture.”
“I can’t? Okay. I’ll go to the police and the press and tell them it’s you leaving the money. I’ll tell them there’s something fishy about the accident. You riding in the backseat of your own car. They’ll want to look into that now that the story is back on everybody’s minds. If you want to take the chance that they open it back up, I’ll go do it.”
She turned to go, her movements possessing a military crispness.
“Wait.” Heavy resignation pressed down on me, like bricks piled on my back. “I don’t know what you want.”
She told me the amount. Ten thousand dollars.
And she told me she needed it in one month. Thirty days.
“That’s the deadline. Thirty days. Round up the money or I go to the police and the media and tell them you’ve been leaving the envelopes. From there . . . like I said, they’ll start digging into everything in your life. You’re a pretty well-known guy in this town. It could be embarrassing for that kind of thing to hit the news.”
“You’re asking for too much. Far too much. I can’t come up with that much money on such short notice. I have a family. And we just . . .” It sounded silly to mention it in contrast to her lost and injured sisters. But I said it anyway. “We’re having work done on our house this spring. I put down a deposit. That was a lot of what we had saved.”
Dawn gave me a stare as cold as ice. She used her left fist and rapped on the hood of the car twice. “Cry me a river. I think you’ll find a way. I don’t believe you have a choice. Ten thousand. Thirty days.”
She drove off, leaving me sitting in the road as the sun came up. Just like that—I had a blackmailer.
I thought back to that article, the one in which Dawn’s mother had called me an angel.
* * *
—
Everything I’m about to tell you proves how wrong she was. . . .
CHAPTER ONE
“Ryan.”
Someone called my name. I was leaving the Juniper Pig and stepping into the parking lot, heading for my car. The voice that came through the dark was sharp and husky, a knife swipe through the night, and I jumped.
I couldn’t tell if a man or a woman had spoken.
After work I’d stopped by the Pig, the microbrewery I’d owned a small stake in for the last sixteen months. I was one of three partners, and my contribution had been the smallest, but we took turns going by in the evenings to see how things were running. And that night was my turn.
I hadn’t wanted to stop by the bar. Amanda was waiting at home with our baby, Henry, and thinking of seeing them made my stomach flutter with anticipation and joy. My time away from them felt longer than the hours that passed on the clock, and returning to them every evening was sweet relief. Since Henry had been born, I’d been trying hard to curb my tendency to overwork. But it wasn’t easy. Since my dad died while I was in college, leaving my mother and me high and dry, I’d been compelled to keep going forward, to keep pushing at work. . . .
I hoped Henry would change that. I hoped I could slow down.
But a shadowy figure came toward me in the darkness, freezing my progress. The person was short, the face in shadow.
It was early April, the air still cool, the days still lengthening. I waited, watching. I’d just posted to my Instagram account, sharing a photo of the beer I’d just sampled, one of our brewers’ latest concoctions, the HopPig IPA.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“Ryan?”
Dawn Steiner? Her deadline loomed that week, just two days away, but I hadn’t seen or heard from her since that morning almost a month ago. And I’d made almost no progress on finding the money for her. Had she decided to come looking for me?
But then I saw who it was and slipped my phone back into my pocket.
“Is that really you?” I asked the figure still standing in the shadows of the building. Relieved.
He stepped closer, moving into the crisp light that spilled from the windows of the Pig. “It’s me,” he said. “Indeed.”
Blake Norton. My best friend from college. And also my most challenging. He was loyal, fun, and charming. He was immature, reckless, and juvenile. He was Butch Cassidy crossed with Bluto from Animal House.
I hadn’t seen him in six months, even though we lived in the same small city, Rossingville, Kentucky. He held out his hand, and we shook.
Blake looked thinner, healthier, like maybe he’d dropped fifteen or twenty pounds. His face was less puffy. I wondered if he’d stopped drinking and started exercising more, if he was on one of his periodic health kicks. He was shorter than me by two inches, and he wore a neatly trimmed beard. His shoulder-length hair was off his face and combed into place for a change, and his flannel shirt appeared to be free of stains, the sleeves rolled to his elbows with a measure of precision.
“Why are you skulking around in the parking lot?” I asked.
I realized I was happy to see him. Years of friendship, countless memories big and small, and an endless supply of fierce loyalty brought a smile to my face.
“Skulking.” He smiled as well. “I could always count on you to come up with a ten-dollar word like ‘skulking.’”
“I got one of those calendars for Christmas,” I said, “the kind that gives you a new word every day. Today’s was ‘skulking.’”
Blake shook his head. “No, you know all the fancy words. You always have. I remember you were an English major when we started college. You switched to marketing later, but I know what your real passion was.”