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“It’s beautiful,” she said. “So Christmassy, with all the lights on the old-fashioned shops and stuff. But you like the city, and you normally work 24/7. If this hiding-out thing goes on much longer, you won’t know what to do with yourself.”
    He gave her a sardonic smile. “Hiding out? Come on. This is my dream vacation. Loads of people would love to get away and enjoy nature as they pan for gold.”
    “Dream vacation, my ass,” she muttered.
    Her choice of words shocked him a little when she swore, but he found her language kind of funny, too, coming from someone who looked like a 1950s housewife with her floral button-up shirts and ankle pants.
    “For you, this is hell,” she added with even more conviction. “You’ve been traveling from one town to the next for more than a week. And it’s been too cold to do much outside.”
    “At least I’m still in one piece.” So far, he’d whiled away the hours by working on his laptop. After posting a help-wanted ad on Craigslist, he’d been poring through résumés—pondering each one much longer than usual. He needed to fill the open slot Eric James left when he got stabbed in the shoulder and his wife insisted he find safer work. But it was difficult to do any meaningful evaluation when he couldn’t meet the applicants face-to-face. He had to refer the candidates who had promise to Marilyn. She interviewed them, then called him to report.
    He’d also been dealing with his accountant, at long last getting caught up on his books, something he rarely took the time to do when living his normal life. He preferred to be on the phone or answering email queries, booking jobs for himself and the six bodyguards he employed. Business had never been better, which was part of the reason he was dying to get back to it. There were times he felt so much like a regular person, like a regular
businessman,
he could almost forget the past.
    Almost but not quite. There were some incidents he could never forget and people who wouldn’t let him forget others.
    “You could take up mountain biking,” she suggested. “My two sons love it.”
    “That’s outdoors, too.”
    “But you don’t do it standing in a river. And if you ride hard enough, you stay warm. They bike year-round. We live in California, after all.”
    He moved the check he’d just signed to the bottom of the stack. “I won’t be vacationing long enough to take up a new sport.”
    She looked across the park toward the maple and dogwood trees that lined one side. Those trees blocked the sight of the Victorian where he was staying, but Marilyn had no idea. He wasn’t telling anyone where he slept at night—for their safety as well as his.
    Not that he’d actually spent the night at Little Mary’s... And he wouldn’t. Eve had asked him to leave.
    “How do you know?” Marilyn asked.
    Finished with the payroll, he tapped the edges of the checks on the table to even the stack. “What do you mean?”
    “How do you know how long you’ll be here? You weren’t planning to be gone in the first place, just up and left in the middle of the night. Yet we’re both here in this park.
Something
must be wrong. Are you sure you’ll be able to fix it?”
    Maybe not. He’d been fighting the same battle for years; he’d thought things had finally settled down—until he heard otherwise from an old friend. In a different time, a different place, he would’ve closed down his business, sold his house and moved. Anything less was gambling with his life.
    But he wasn’t about to sacrifice everything he’d created now that he’d hit his stride. At thirty-six, he was getting too old to be constantly starting over. Not only that, but he was afraid of what another uprooting would do to him. Afraid he’d no longer have the determination or the energy to keep plowing forward.
    No way could he allow the gang he’d joined in prison to cost him the ground he’d already gained. He just had to lie low for a while, make