Hidden

“No.”

Okay, well, fine.

“I…” She stopped, sighed, sounding almost frustrated. “I want to tell you something that has no relevance to anything, but I don’t want you to ask any questions. Is that fair?”

“It is in my book.” He’d accept anything as fair if it meant she was going to talk to him. Not that he wanted to hear so much that he’d have to get further involved. He just wanted to know enough so he wouldn’t have to worry.

“I—when I was growing up, I had this best friend. Leah was her name.” Tricia’s voice took on the soft note that melted him. So loving, compassionate. Honest.

“We met when we were three—our mothers knew each other. Neither of us ever had another close friend after that.”

If he hadn’t known Alicia, he probably wouldn’t have understood that. “Didn’t you get sick of each other?”

“Not really. We just fit, you know?”

He hadn’t, before Alicia. “Yeah.”

“Anyway, I was thinking about her today. Remembering the summer before we graduated from high school.”

Leaning against the back wall of the station, surrounded by yard and a privacy fence, Scott slid down to the cement, intrigued as hell. If this was what his questions last night had brought him, glimpses of a younger Tricia, he hadn’t made such a bad mistake in forcing the issue.

“We found this clearing. It was a cliff, really, high above the tracks for an old mining train.”

Which could’ve put her in a million places in California and Arizona alone.

“We christened it our sacred place and whenever either of us had a problem or needed some time alone, that’s where we’d go. Inevitably, if one of us went up, the other one found her there. It was kind of weird.”