Cheyenne hugged her. “You’re so good.”

Eve missed the old days, when she’d had more time with Chey. Now Chey, Gail and Callie were all married. Even Noah had a wife and a baby on the way. Eve had never dreamed the biggest playboy in the group would settle down before she did. She felt like the last person to leave a party....

But she wasn’t the last. Ted hadn’t married. He hadn’t even been serious with anyone since Sophia. Riley, Baxter and Kyle were single, too, but they didn’t really count. Riley had a kid—he’d actually been the first to have one. Baxter was gay and in love with Noah, who wasn’t. And Kyle had been married. His wife had revealed herself to be the spawn of Satan so they’d divorced within months, but at least he’d known some kind of romance. Actually, he was still in love with Olivia, who’d married his stepbrother. So why was her love life so uneventful?

She’d survive, she told herself. She shouldn’t wallow in self-pity when there were people suffering from much bigger problems than a bout of loneliness. People like Sophia. She’d once been the most popular girl in school, the daughter of the mayor. And she’d married the richest guy in town. How would it feel to suddenly become a pariah after having all that? The reversal alone had probably given her whiplash. And what about poor Alexa?

Eve had such great parents. She couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to find out her dad was a total douchebag.

Alexa was sobbing by the time Eve made it down to her. She was crying so hard, in fact, that she didn’t hear Eve’s approach.

“Hey, kiddo. You okay?” Eve asked, putting a hand on her shoulder.

Alexa was too distraught to even be startled. She hiccuped and wiped her cheeks as she looked up. “Am I—” she glanced around the cemetery “—am I not supposed to be in here?”

Eve knelt beside her. “It’s perfectly fine for you to visit your father’s grave. I just didn’t want you to be alone if you needed someone to talk to. You don’t know me very well, but I’m a friend of your mom’s.”

“You are?” She sounded skeptical, and for good reason. Eve had never even been to Sophia’s house. They’d had coffee together a few times at Black Gold with the others. That was it.

“We went to high school together,” she said to bolster her claim.

With a sniff, Alexa again dashed a hand over her wet cheeks. “Oh.”

“Are you going to be okay?” Eve gestured at the flowers adorning the grave. “I know it’s hard to lose someone you love.”

“Do you think it’s true?” she asked.

Eve lowered her head to meet Alexa’s eye. “Do I think what’s true?”

“That he did all those terrible things? That he didn’t love us like he said he did?”

Oh, boy... Eve took a deep breath as she tried to come up with an answer that would help instead of hurt. “Sometimes, when things go wrong, people panic and make foolish mistakes. I bet your father wasn’t in the best frame of mind at the end. I’m sure he would’ve regretted his actions, had he lived. He loved you. There’s no question about that.”

“But he did steal everyone’s money? And he was leaving us?”

Alexa’s expression grew more beseeching. She seemed to be pleading for the truth, so Eve felt she had to be honest even if what she said would be painful to hear.

“That’s what the evidence seems to suggest, sweetheart.”

Two more tears slipped from her pretty blue eyes, eyes that were so much like her mother’s. “And now I have no one,” she said as if the world had just stopped turning.

Eve feared she’d gone too far. “You have your mom. She’s not going anywhere.”

Alexa’s tears started to fall faster and she had to gulp for breath as she blurted, “My mom’s not the same. She needs help.”

“In what way?”

“Maybe she’s drinking again. I don’t think so because there’s nothing in the house, but...she could be hiding it from me.”

Eve felt a new measure of alarm. “You’re saying she’s drunk?”

Alexa shrugged. “She can’t get out of bed.”

Did Sophia have a drinking problem? If so, she wouldn’t want anyone to know about it, which made Eve feel like some nosy, intrusive bystander, gawking at the scene of a car crash. “She’s grieving, like you. The process affects us all differently.”

“It’s more than that,” Alexa insisted. “She won’t eat, won’t let me open the drapes, hardly ever talks to me.” She plucked a blade of grass. “I’m going to have to call my grandma, but—” she turned her watery gaze to her father’s elaborate marble headstone “—then she’ll make me come and live with her.” Getting to her feet, she picked up her bag of groceries. She seemed so weary she could hardly move.

Eve couldn’t let her go home by herself. “Why don’t I come with you?” she said. “I’ll check on your mom, see if there’s anything I can do.”

She’d expected Alexa to be relieved to have reinforcements, but her lips slanted into a frown. “Thanks, but...you’d better not. No one’s supposed to know,” she said and started off, all but dragging those groceries along.

Eve wasn’t sure what to do. She stood where she was and watched her for a few seconds, then jogged to catch up. “Lexi, I’m your mom’s friend, as I told you. And it sounds like she could use a friend right now.”

“But then she’ll find out I told you,” Alexa said.

“You only told me because you love her and you want to get her the help she needs.” Eve took the bag of groceries. “So let’s put these in my car and drive over together, okay? We’ll do what we can to get her back on her feet.”

Alexa looked as if she was afraid to even hope, the poor girl. “You think it might work?”

“Sometimes we have to fight for those we love. What I think is that we need to stage an intervention.”

Alexa remained skeptical. “Is an intervention like rehab? Because she’s already done rehab. That lasted the whole month of September.”

Eve secretly winced at the information the innocent Lexi had revealed. But at least it enabled her to view Sophia in a far more sympathetic light. Sophia had always been the girl who had it all. But maybe she was just more skillful at hiding her troubles. “It’s not rehab. It’s where your loved ones get hold of you and shake some sense into you, get you turned around and heading in the right direction.”

For the first time since Eve had confronted her, Alexa lifted her chin and seemed to overcome her tears. “Will it work?”

“We won’t know until we try.”

Her sniff sounded more decisive than before. “Yes,” she said with a nod, “I want to stage an intervention.”

Eve reached out with her free hand. “Let’s do it,” she said, but before they left the inn, she checked the sack, found it full of cold cereal and snack items and decided to grab a few ingredients from her own pantry.

9

Voices carried up to Sophia. At first she imagined she was still in rehab, that some of her fellow “inmates”—as they’d jokingly referred to themselves—were talking in the hall outside her room. But when she opened her eyes and blinked at the ceiling, she realized she was at home. Then the rest of what had happened during the past month came rushing in on her. Skip was dead but he hadn’t just stepped out of her life like she’d long hoped he would; he’d done everything he could to ruin her first. She had a thousand dollars or so to her name and no way to earn more. Alexa needed her but she was turning out to be as terrible a mother as Skip had always accused her of being. And all of that reminded her of why she didn’t want to wake up. She was going to lose her daughter. Agent Freeman had warned her. There didn’t seem to be a damn thing she could do about it, though. Except sleep. Sleep was her only escape.

She almost drifted off again, but Alexa was talking to someone in the cathedral-like entrance of their house, and curiosity got the better of her.