had been a Frank Sinatra kind of man. Respected. Capable. Admired. People naturally wanted to be around him, to follow his lead. Jeffrey had taken it all in stride. He’d gone to Auburn on a football scholarship. He’d graduated with a degree in American History. He’d chosen to be a cop because his mentor was a cop. He’d moved to Grant County because he understood small towns.
Sara could clearly remember the first time she’d seen him. She was volunteering as the team doctor at a high school football game. Jeffrey, the new chief, was glad-handing the crowd. He was a breathtakingly gorgeous man. In her entire life, Sara had never felt such a naked, visceral attraction. She had stared at Jeffrey long enough to do the calculations. Tessa was going to be sleeping with him before the weekend was over.
But Jeffrey had chosen Sara.
From the beginning, she had been all the wrong things with him. Flattered. Completely out of her element. Easy, because she’d slept with him on the first date. Damaged, because Jeffrey was the first man Sara had been with after being brutally raped in Atlanta.
She had told Jeffrey that she’d moved back to Grant County because she wanted to serve a rural community. That was a lie. From the age of thirteen, Sara had been determined to become the top pediatric surgeon in Atlanta. Every spare moment from that point onward had been spent with her head in a textbook or her butt in a desk chair.
Ten minutes in the staff restroom of Grady Hospital had completely derailed her life.
Sara had been handcuffed. She had been silenced. She had been raped. She had been stabbed. She had developed an ectopic pregnancy that robbed her of the ability to have children. Then there was the trial. Then there was the excruciating wait for the verdict, the even more excruciating wait for the sentencing, the move back to Grant County, the establishment of a new career, a new life, a new kind of normal.
Then there was this beautiful, intelligent man who knocked her off her feet.
At first, Sara hadn’t told Jeffrey about the rape because she was waiting for the right moment. Then she’d realized there wasn’t going to be a right moment. The one thing that Jeffrey was most attracted to, the thing that Sara had over most everyone else, was her strength. She couldn’t let him know that she’d been broken. That she had given up her dreams. That she had been a victim.
Sara had kept the secret throughout their first marriage. She had been relieved she’d held it back during their divorce. She had kept it hidden when they’d started dating again, falling in love again. She had kept the secret for so long that by the time she’d finally told Jeffrey, Sara had felt ashamed, as if it was all somehow her fault.
The song on the radio pulled her back into the present. Amanda’s ring clicked against the steering wheel as she tapped along to Sinatra’s ode to Chicago—
One town that won’t let you down.
Sara looked for a tissue. Her sleeve—Will’s sleeve—was empty. Charlie had taken her duffle bag. She’d left her purse in the van. She should call Charlie and ask him to lock it in her office, but the thought of taking her phone out of her pocket, dialing the number, was too much.
She wanted Will. To spoon with him on the couch. To sit in his lap and feel his arms around her. He was probably halfway to Macon right now. They were literally going in opposite directions.
Sara could remember exactly when she had told Will about the rape. She’d only known him for a few months. He was still married. She was still unsure. They were standing in her parents’ front yard. It was freezing cold. Her greyhounds were shivering. Sara was longing for Will to kiss her, but of course he wasn’t going to actually kiss her until she kissed him. The confession had come naturally. Or as naturally as it ever could. She had told Will that she had put off telling her husband about the rape because she didn’t want Jeffrey to think that she was weak.
Will had told Sara that he’d never once thought of her as anything but strong.
He was kind that way. He was physically impressive. He was razor-sharp. But Will was not the type of man who commanded attention. He was the man at the party who stood in the corner petting the neighbor’s dog. His humor was mostly self-deprecating. He worried about how people felt. He was silent, but always watchful. Sara assumed this came from his horrific childhood. Will had grown up in the foster care system. He seldom talked about that time, but she knew that he had suffered a shocking level of abuse. His skin told her the story—cigarette burns, electrical burns, jagged ridges where bone had fractured through skin. He was shy about the scars, unreasonably embarrassed that he’d been the sort of child that someone would hate.
That wasn’t the Will that the rest of the world knew. His protracted silences made most people uncomfortable. He had a feralness to him. An undercurrent of violence. An internal spring that threatened to flick open like the blade of a knife. In another life, he might have been one of the thugs locked up at Phillips. Will had barely graduated high school. He’d been homeless at eighteen. There were criminal charges in his background that Amanda had somehow managed to expunge. This clean slate had given Will the opportunity to change his life. Most men would not have taken it. Will was not most men. He’d gone to college. He’d become a special agent. He was a damn good cop. He cared about people. He wanted to get it right.
Sara was loath to compare the two great loves of her life, but there was one very stark difference between them: With Jeffrey, Sara had known that there were dozens, possibly hundreds of other women who could love him just as intensely as she did.
With Will, Sara was keenly aware that she was the only woman on earth who could love him the way that he deserved to be loved.
Amanda said, “We’ve got another half hour. Is there something you’d rather listen to?”
Sara dialed the tuner to Pop2K and cranked up the volume. She rolled down the window the rest of the way. The sharp breeze cut into her skin. She closed her eyes to keep them from burning.
Amanda endured ten seconds of the Red Hot Chili Peppers before she broke.
The radio snapped off. Sara’s window snicked up.
Amanda said, “Will told you about Nesbitt.”
Sara smiled, because it had taken her long enough. “I thought you were a detective.”
“I thought so, too.” Amanda’s tone showed a begrudging respect. “How much do you know?”
“Everything Will knows.”
The words clearly stung. Amanda wasn’t used to Will choosing a different side. Still, she told Sara, “Nesbitt’s jacket is in my briefcase behind the seat.”
Sara stretched around to retrieve the file. She opened it on her lap. The jacket was at least two inches thick. She skipped over the expected—that the raging asshole had managed to buy himself twenty more years—and found the medical section. They didn’t need a warrant to read the details. As an inmate, Nesbitt didn’t have a right to privacy. Sara skimmed the voluminous notes on his past hospitalizations and multiple visits to the prison infirmary.
Nesbitt was a below-the-knee amputee, abbreviated as BKA. During his eight-year incarceration, he’d seen dozens, possibly hundreds, of different doctors. There was no continuity of care in prison. You were more likely to see a unicorn than a wound-care specialist. Inmates got what they were given, and if they were very lucky, the doctor wasn’t fleeing malpractice suits or employed by a private contractor whose
