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needed to reassess where my life was headed.”
    Nora did one of the worst things possible and remained quiet, waiting for Mia to continue. If she’d been anyone but Brent’s mother, telling her the truth would’ve been difficult, but doable. But what Mia had come to understand was too cruel to say to her. She wished she could have loved Brent more. It would’ve been a whole lot easier than not being able to love him enough.
    “He deserved better than what I could give him.” That sounded lame, even to Mia, but it was as truthful as she could be without causing even more pain.
    Nora nodded. “But he would’ve taken whatever you were willing to share and been happy.”
    “That wouldn’t have been fair to him.” Mia hoped she’d at least done the right thing by letting him go.
    “I get the logic of that,” Nora said. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I have a mother’s heart, and I hated to see him hurt.”
    Mia pressed her lips together tightly. She’d run away and left an emotional mess in her wake. “Believe it or not, I did, too.”
    A solemn moment passed, then Nora appeared preoccupied. Mia thought it would be best for her to leave. After all, what more could she offer Nora other than apologies?
    As if she suspected Mia was about to go, Nora said, “I need to tell you what Brent was doing in Switzerland.”
    Lila had filled Mia in on the details she knew. “Wasn’t he was attending a funeral for a friend?” Mia asked, although she’d never heard him mention a friend from Switzerland.
    “That’s what he told everyone. He even found an obituary for a young man from Lucerne and used his story as cover.”
    “I’m confused. Didn’t Brent fall from a mountain ridge while he was spreading his friend’s ashes?” Listening to her own words, she started to see the contradiction. “How could that have happened if the funeral story was only a ruse?”
    The creases between Nora’s eyebrows deepened. “I hesitated to tell you, but I promised Brent I would. And when keeping a promise is the last thing you can do for someone…”
    “Why would you hesitate?”
    She leveled a serious gaze on Mia, her eyes full of fear. “It involves your family’s company.”
    Mia’s heart hitched. “In what way?”
    Nora stared at her tightly clasped hands. “He suspected some corporate wrongdoing involving the vaccine, so he went to investigate. I told him you weren’t the person to confide in about this, considering your connection to the company, but he insisted.”
    Mia’s pulse ticked faster. “You’re saying he went to Switzerland to investigate something suspicious that had to do with Moncure’s vaccine and ended up dead?” Grief could do strange things to a person’s mind, and Mia began to worry even more about Nora.
    She nodded slowly. “Brent called me two days before he died. He told me if anything unexpected happened to him that he’d gotten a safe-deposit box at a Swiss bank where he’d leave the information he’d uncovered about the vaccine.”
    Mia couldn’t believe what she was hearing, and wasn’t sure she should. Adrenaline pulsed through her in waves. She took off her jacket, unable to stand the heat.
    “He asked me to write down the name of the bank,” Nora said. “But I wasn’t sure I really needed to. I didn’t understand that something so serious was going on. Brent loved working for your family’s company. I figured he was just making sure he was wrong about some suspicion he had, then he’d come on home and things would work themselves out.” Her eyes welled and she pulled a tissue from a flowery box on the end table.
    “Did you write down the name of the bank?”
    Nora picked up an old-fashioned address book from the coffee table. “He would always test me, you know?” She smiled sorrowfully. He’d done the same thing with Mia, sometimes asking her about a detail of a conversation they’d had just to make sure she’d been listening. “I knew he was going