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glossed over.
    Her mother sat in her wheelchair, saying good-bye to the last of the guests.
    “I don’t know where Connie lives. Can you give me directions?” PJ said, steeling her voice as she freed Davy to scavenge the debris of the mint table. The last thing she needed was for her mother to see her with Boone.
    Besides, she hadn’t returned for Boone. And there would be no “this time.”
    Elizabeth said nothing, her brow puckered, her eyes searching. Then, “You can follow me.”
    “You’re driving, Mom? Are you sure   —?”
    “My Mercedes can practically drive itself. And my doctor said I could. You don’t expect me to sit at home for six weeks, do you?”
    Clearly PJ had lost her mind. She opened her mouth to admit this.
    “Besides, it’s my left ankle, and I don’t have a . . . manual . I suppose you still have a Volkswagen?”
    She said it like she always had . . . as if PJ had brought home a mule to park in their driveway.
    “I’ve upgraded, but I’ll always be a Bug girl.” PJ didn’t exactly mean it like that, but still, she didn’t appreciate her mother’s expression.
    “I’m sure you will.” Elizabeth rolled away.
    PJ retrieved her traveling clothes and cornered Davy, then followed her mother from the building. Elizabeth ditched the wheelchair for a set of crutches, and by the time PJ strapped Davy into the car seat Connie had transferred to her backseat, her mother had pulled up in her silver Mercedes.
    It was then that Boone turned from the crime scene, his pale gaze on PJ.
    She didn’t look back as she peeled away, even when his words rebounded in her head: “It’ll be different this time, Peej. I promise.”
    * * *
    PJ glanced at Davy in the rearview mirror. He’d flattened his hands over his ears, his eyes clenched tight, his breath ballooning his cheeks as his face reddened.
    “Davy, are you okay? Davy?”
    He didn’t react, as if he’d gone deaf also.
    Could a child self-suffocate? “Stop it, Davy!”
    He let his breath go and gulped in another.
    “Don’t die on me, okay?”
    He stuck out his tongue at her.
    She ignored him, following her mother through town, passing the old neighborhoods. Trudi had lived on the “other” side of town   —near the high school. So Trudi had married after all. To a man with self-control issues, no less.PJ’s first clear impression of Jack   —in his sopping wet uniform, water turning his black shoes squeaky, his blond hair standing in spikes   —dredged up memories of Trudi’s high school squeeze, a wide receiver who’d caught passes from more than just the quarterback. How many times had Trudi ended up on PJ’s back porch, her face in her hands, swearing to dump Greg?
    If anyone could convict PJ for not keeping in touch, it might be Trudi. She dearly hoped that the behavior she’d seen didn’t follow Jack home.
    PJ wondered where Trudi lived now as she followed her mother’s shiny sedan up a curve of shoreline that rose to a bluff overlooking Kellogg.
    They veered west into the Chapel Hills neighborhood, and PJ tapped her brakes as they passed her old house. She noted a fresh coat of paint on the front porch columns, the hydrangeas grown halfway to her old bedroom window. The trellis had vanished   —better late than never. Still, the house looked unaged, a time capsule for everything she’d thought she’d be as she lay huddled under the floral sheets, watching the fingers of the oak tree in the front yard reach past the eyelet curtains into her bedroom, crawl along her baby blue carpet, up the cotton candy pink walls. She’d watched the shadows, longing for daylight and to be the princess that belonged in such a room.
    Elizabeth had probably long since redecorated.
    They wound through elegant neighborhoods. PJ riffled through her sister’s history, remembering how, shortly after Connie found Burke in that compromising embrace with his law clerk, she’d dumped her condo overlooking downtownMinneapolis’s Loring