felt. She’d expected to feel relieved, and she did, but she’d also expected to feel some sense of closure, some sense that she could finally begin her life. She felt neither of those things, but they had only been found forty-eight hours ago. Only forty-eight hours since Lucas had held her in that dim, cold canyon. Only forty-eight hours since they’d trekked the long, mostly quiet walk back to Driscoll’s where she’d phoned Agent Gallagher. It would take time, she figured. A week . . . maybe two, until she’d be able to finally put the tragedy behind her and accept that they’d never return.
I’m alone in this world.
It wasn’t that she’d dreamed or hoped they were coming back. She hadn’t fooled herself into believing they weren’t actually dead and gone. It was just . . . not having proof of their deaths—of the fact that she hadn’t simply imagined the accident, the cold, the falling, that had taken them from her—had kept her from being able to move forward emotionally.
Saying the words to Lucas a couple of days before, admitting she was stuck, was an important revelation for her. The hunt for her parents’ wreckage had kept her from moving forward. All these years, it’d kept her trapped in a way—emotionally immobile. Looking into his eyes, answering his perceptive question honestly, it had suddenly become crystal clear. Now though, she’d found her family. She didn’t have to remain lost in time. Now . . . now she could figure out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. She’d want to, she was sure of it. Just . . . not that day.
“I wish you would have told me before you went to Lucas’s place. I would have come with you.”
She snapped back to the present, considering what Agent Gallagher had said as he’d taken a seat across from her.
“I’m sorry. I thought about calling you but . . . I thought I was being crazy. That locket . . . it’d been so long since I’d seen it. I thought maybe I was imagining things.”
Agent Gallagher regarded her for a moment. “So, Lucas found your parents’ wreck at some point and took the necklace from there?”
Harper nodded. “He said he found it years ago.”
“Did he say why he wore it?”
Harper shrugged. “I didn’t ask. I figured it was just something interesting to him. I don’t know.” Maybe he liked the picture of a family inside it. Something he didn’t have. She thought about the way he’d held her as she’d cried, gently but stiffly, as though he didn’t know exactly how to hold another person. She wondered if anyone had ever held him, and her heart ached when she thought the answer was probably no. Or at least . . . not for a very long time.
“The car was found about nine miles from Lucas’s house. And nowhere near the highway between Missoula and Helena Springs. Can you think of a reason your parents might have turned off the highway onto dirt back roads? Why they would have been so far from the highway?”
Harper shook her head slowly. “No. My dad had driven from Missoula to Helena Springs hundreds of times. He knew the route like the back of his hand.” Harper searched her mind for anything about that ride home, anything that might shed light on this new information. But as always, when it came to the accident, there was nothing. Nothing except the feeling of the car falling and then the bone-shattering landing at the bottom of the canyon. Then . . . darkness. “It makes sense why the search party didn’t find the car,” she murmured aloud. They’d looked for it for weeks before giving up. No wonder her own search had never yielded results. She’d been looking miles and miles from where the accident had actually happened. She’d been—
“Do you have any memory of climbing out of that canyon?”
Harper frowned. “Not . . . really.” Brief flashes maybe. Her hands reaching, gripping. Then . . . nothing. “And that’s the weird part,” she continued. “After surviving a near-fatal accident in freezing weather, I have no idea how I made it out of that hole. I must have climbed, but . . .” She shook her head, her frown deepening. “Maybe the adrenalin . . . I don’t know. I was in a coma for weeks afterward and my memory is just so—” She massaged her temples as though she could fix