Caleb looked at her. Looked again. Nothing connected. Not her face, not her bearing, not the red dress or the coat or any detail of her that he could locate in any memory he owned.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Have we met?”
Something moved briefly in her expression.
“You let me into your house last night,” she said. “I’m a little hurt you’ve forgotten already.”
Caleb looked at the convoy. Looked back at her. Eli tugged his father’s shirt. “Dad, who is she?”
Caleb shook his head slowly. “I genuinely have no idea, buddy.”
To understand how a woman like Nora Ashby ended up on a dirt road outside Clover Ridge, Tennessee at eleven seventeen on a Tuesday night with a dead GPS and eight percent battery remaining on her phone, you had to go back to the morning she left Chicago, and to her father, and to the piece of paper he had pressed into her hand with a grip firmer than she had expected from a man who had spent the last two months losing weight he could not afford to lose.
