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After the meeting, she worked another hour, incorporating her careful notes before checking her email. She found two local inquiries for website designs. She couldn’t find the joy in them, not yet, but responded before putting them aside.

Tomorrow, she decided. She’d find the joy in them tomorrow.

Instead, she worked on changes requested for a book cover. After her checks on and posts to various social media, she admitted she needed to shut down for the day.

No amount of work, no amount of focus could block that portrait, that luminous face, out of her head.

She’d hang the portrait.

Like a faithful guard, Yoda stuck with her when she went downstairs again. She found the cat sitting on the piano in the music room—another watchful guard.

“You’re just the right cat for Cleo, and the manor.” She gave Pye a long stroke, then crouched down to snuggle Yoda. “And you’re perfect in every way.”

When she hung the portrait, she stepped back to take in the five lost brides. Clover reached out to comfort with “Let It Be.”

“But I can’t, can I? I can’t let it be. I’m here to stop it, and I don’t know how. And God,God, I look at this beautiful bride in her lovely ruffled dress, and I see her dying in blood and pain. I hear the babies she fought to bring into the world crying. I see Hugh Poole grieving.

“And I see that bitch slinking in to take her ring.”

The doorbell began to bong, and Sonya swore she heard laughter, wild and crazed, along with it.

“Oh, go to hell.” Disgusted, she shoved at her hair. “I need air.”

With her four-legged guards flanking her, she strode to the front door, threw it open. She walked to the seawall, where the waves crashed, where the water stretched—shimmering blue—in an endless roll.

The perfect June day, as spring eased its way to summer, brought out the pleasure boats. She watched them glide, over the ocean, down in the bay. Sails full, motors racing.

Then a school of dolphins, bulleting along, leaping up, diving down.

It calmed her. And still, she couldn’t find the joy.

Windows banged shut in the house behind her. She ignored them.

Today I give you nothing, she thought, even as the grief rose up from her heart to clog her throat.

She didn’t hear the truck coming up the road, but Yoda did. He let out his happy bark, and when she turned, she saw Trey’s truck pulling in.

It flooded her now, all the grief and sorrow she’d walled off to get through the work, to stand against the viciousness, the violence that shadowed her home.

Mookie leaped out, long tail whipping as he and Yoda held a sniffing, wagging contest. Then Trey, hair windblown, in a gray suit, the blue tie loosened around his neck, the battered briefcase over his shoulder.

And it all broke through as he walked across the lawn toward her.

“Last client of the day just down the road, so—”

His easy smile of greeting snapped away. And with a look of worry, he quickened his pace.

“What happened?”

As the tears burst through, she simply fell into his arms.

“Sonya—”

“Just hold on to me a minute,” she managed. “Just hold on to me.”

“I’ve got you. But tell me if you’re hurt.” Stroking her back, he pressed his lips to her hair. “Just tell me if you’re hurt.”

“Not that way.”