“How did you find out?”

  He hesitates. “The police told me. I called from the Cape to make sure you were still okay up at that cabin, and they told me what had happened, and that you had been taken to the hospital.”

  “Garth, it wasn’t Rachel,” she says, needing him to know. “It was—”

  “Hagan. Shh, I know. Don’t even think about him right now. It’s over.”

  She closes her eyes, trying to shut out the image of Pat’s menacing face.

  No, think of something else. Something pleasant.

  “What about the boys?” she asks, smiling faintly. “How are they?”

  “They’re fine. They’re with your father and Sue, probably eating junk and playing Candyland.”

  Brynn manages a weary smile. “That’s good. I have so much to tell you, Garth.”

  “I have some things to tell you, too. But there’ll be plenty of time for talking later. And for visitors, too. There’s someone waiting to see you.”

  Yes, she thinks, closing her eyes contentedly.

  There will be plenty of time for everything.

  After all that worrying about how he was going to react…

  He’s still here.

  And he wants this baby as much as she does.

  Brynn drifts off into a pleasant dream in which Fiona is alive again, holding her hand and telling her that everything’s going to be okay from now on.

  EPILOGUE

  “Happy Birthday to you…Happy Birthday to you…Happy Birthday, dear Brynn…Happy Birthday to you.”

  The song ends with a chorus of cheers, and Jeremy urging, “Make a wish before you blow them out, Mommy!”

  Brynn nods, looking at the concentric circles of flickering candles on the bakery cake. There are thirty-two. One for every year of her life, plus an extra for luck.

  Luck.

  She’s had more than her share of that in her life.

  More than her share of wishes come true, as well.

  But there’s always room for another.

  She closes her eyes and makes one.

  Then she opens her eyes and blows out the candles with as much breath as she can muster.

  Standing on either side of her, Jeremy and Caleb puff their cheeks and exhale noisily.

  “We got them all, Mom!” Caleb announces. “Your wish is going to come true!”

  “Say cheese, guys,” Sue calls from the opposite side of the table where she’s standing beside Brynn’s father, aiming a camera at them.

  Brynn pulls her sons close and smiles as her stepmother clicks and the bulb flashes.

  “One more. Garth, get in there with Marie.”

  Brynn turns to see her husband stepping in with their five-month-old daughter proudly held in the crook of his arm.

  Little Marie looks strikingly like her daddy. People say that all the time. But Brynn knows he would dote on her regardless of that. By the time she was born last May, you would think the whole pregnancy had been his idea. It seems so very long ago that Brynn worried he might leave her over it. Long ago, and ludicrous.

  We’ve come a long way since then,she thinks, watching Sue take aim through the camera lens.All of us.

  This milestone year taught Brynn how to let go. How to move on. And, most importantly, how to forgive—not just Garth, but Sue. And Fee. Even Tildy.

  But not Patrick Hagan.

  Perhaps she can forgive him for what he did to her, but not for the lives he took.

  Ashley’s might have been destroyed completely, if not for the twist of fate that saved her mother.

  That weekend, Fiona had been picked up by Sharon and whisked to the safety of her home near Albany, where she planned to lay low until it was safe to return.

  Tragically, her sister Deirdre, getting over the breakup with her girlfriend, had come to surprise her for their birthday and let herself into the house.

  It was she, and not Fee, who was killed that night. Brynn realized it at the funeral when she saw Fiona trying to mask her left-handedness and when her hair fell back into its natural part on the right.

  Fiona was understandably stunned when she heard the news of her own death—and devastated that her beloved sister had died in her place.

  “I had to pretend I was Deirdre,” she told Brynn tearfully when they were reunited at the hospital. “I had no choice; it was the only way I could stay alive for Ashley.”

  Ashley.

  Brynn turns her head and spots her, absently toying with a paper cup filled with Pepsi.

  Fiona’s daughter has suffered through this past year of loss, but the child psychiatrist she’s been seeing believes she’ll come through it relatively intact. It’s just going to take a lot of time to work through the euphoria of having her mother seemingly come back to life, the grief for her lost aunt—and a whole gamut of emotion for her father.

  There was never any question that Pat loved his daughter. But that love was tainted by festering fury over what might have been. He even jeopardized Ashley’s safety to carry out his plans. He confessed to drugging her with a stolen prescription sedative before bed on the night he intended to murder her mother, and waking her on the pretext of taking her on a sunrise hike. He got her to take more of the tranquilizer by lacing a beverage can that supposedly contained Red Bull. Chillingly, she was unconscious in the Jeep, parked in an empty lot around the corner from her own home while her father was inside attacking Deirdre Fitzgerald.

  In Pat’s twisted mind, it was justified.

  Everything about his life had been a failure: his law career, his marriage, his finances. The only redeeming thing he had was Ashley. But as time went on and he reflected on the past, he came to believe that he should have had three children, not one. That he had been cheated.

  When he stumbled across the evidence that his ex-wife had terminated a second pregnancy, it was too much for him. He descended into a private world of hatred and delusion, consumed by the need to punish not just Fiona, but the other three girls who had been there the night pregnant Rachel fell to her death.

  Poor Rachel.

  When Brynn was finally able to piece it all together with Isaac, she learned that in the summer before Rachel’s death, her troubled friend had been involved not just with Pat, but with her stepbrother as well.

  Isaac said she had suffered terrible guilt over their clandestine relationship. They weren’t blood siblings, but in Rachel’s mind, he was her brother, and it was wrong.

  “I never felt that way, though,” he confessed. “I was crazy in love with her. To me, it felt right.”

  Finding out she was pregnant by either him or Pat was too much for Rachel to bear. She must have been drinking so much in an effort to numb her pain that night, or perhaps she was hoping to miscarry the baby.

  Some questions will never be answered.

  Others have been, thanks to forensics.

  Pat led the authorities to the spot where he buried Rachel that terrible night, deep in the forest above Cedar Crest. From what was left of her determined that she had died when she fell from the rock, and she was, indeed, pregnant…with Isaac’s child.

  Her stepbrother took that news perhaps a little harder than he took the confirmation of her death. He told Brynn that in his heart, he had already come to realize she was gone. Still, it was upsetting to learn that he hadn’t just lost Rachel, but his child as well.

  “I’ll learn to live with that, too, though,” he said optimistically, and Brynn agreed.

  You can learn to live with just about anything.

  Isaac sent Brynn a birthday card yesterday. It was postmarked in Hawaii, where he’s vacationing with his girlfriend, Kylah.

  I know this might be a tough birthday for you,he wrote,but stay strong and count your blessings.

  Quincy Hiles sent a card, too. His came from Florida, where he lives now. A man of few words, he merely signed his name. But Brynn was touched nonetheless by the gesture.

  She still speaks to the retired detective from time to time. He likes to call and check in with her and Fiona, grateful that they, at least, escaped with their lives.

  Unlike Deirdre.

  Tildy.

  And Cassie.

  She was discovered, dead, somewhere up in Maine. Brynn didn’t ask for details, but she assumes Pat staged a birthday party scenario for her as well, because Quincy did mention that he left behind a wrapped gift box.

  In it was Rachel’s driver’s license, which he had pulled from her pocket the night she died. He had left Fiona a lock of Rachel’s hair, and Tildy a piece of the sorority sweater Rachel had been wearing.

  In the gift box he intended for Brynn was a silver sorority bracelet that bore the initialsR.L.

  Rachel’s bracelet.

  Fee said Ashley had told her she had seen it in Pat’s apartment. She thought it must be a Ralph Lauren bracelet because of the initials, but Fee immediately knew what they meant.

  It wasn’t easy for Fiona to accept the horrific truth about her ex-husband. But her quick thinking saved Brynn’s life.

  “And you saved mine,” she says, often—to Ashley.

  She’s speaking figuratively, of course.

  Ashley’s candid conversation with her mother—whom she believed was her Aunt Dee—was Fiona’s sobering wakeup call.

  She, more than anyone, has changed in this past year. She quit smoking. She moved to a smaller house in Brynn’s neighborhood. She’s hired two PR associates to help with the workload, and Sharon came back to work for her, saying Fee needs her more than her daughter does.

  Landing new clients—or a rich new husband like James Bingham—is no longer the focus of Fiona’s life.

  Ashley is.

  Fee isn’t the perfect mom, but she’s trying. She takes Ashley to the mall and the movies, and they even went on a mother-daughter Girl Scout campout with Ashley’s friend Meg and her mom, Cynthia.

  “I didn’t think I’d like her,” Fee told Brynn. “Especially after I found out that she was involved with Pat. But she’s a victim, like everyone else was.”

  It turns out Pat convinced an unwitting Cynthia to take Ashley off his hands the weekend he killed Tildy—and then he pretended, to Fiona, to be angry about it.

  “He had us all fooled,” Fee said. “Even me. I knew he was a sick, twisted bastard, but I never realized to what extent.”

  How could any of them have suspected a monster lurked behind the affable, familiar face that was part of their everyday lives?

  Brynn believed for a long time that she would never trust anyone ever again.

  But she was wrong.

  Feeling a hand on her shoulder, she turns to see Garth.

  “Somebody’s hungry,” he says, tilting their fussing daughter into her mother’s instantly outstretched arms.

  Nuzzling Marie’s soft black baby hair against her cheek, Brynn croons, “It’s all right, little one. I’ll feed you now.”

  “I’ll dish out the cake, then,” Fiona offers as Ashley and the boys pull out the extinguished candles and lick the frosting from their wax tips. “Do you have dishes?”

  “Right there.” Brynn indicates the stack of paper party plates beside the cake.

  Fiona glances at the plates. Then her gaze meets Brynn’s.

  I know what she’s thinking, because I’m thinking the same thing.

  Brynn shakes her head slightly.

  No, Fee. We can’t let every birthday party remind us of what he did to your sister, to our friends.

  We have to let go. Move on. Try to forget, if not forgive.

  Fee smiles sadly at her, then nods, picking up the plates. “Who wants cake?”

  Sitting in a quiet corner, Brynn nurses her baby daughter, contentedly watching as the others gather around the table to devour their cake and ice cream.

  Stay strong and count your blessings.

  Isaac’s advice was sound, and well heeded.

  “If she’s done eating, I’ll take her now.”

  Brynn looks up to see Garth standing over her as she finishes burping the baby on her shoulder.

  “Oh, it’s okay,” she says. “I like to hold her.”

  “But if you’re holding her, you can’t open this.” He extends a wrapped gift.

  Her heart skips a beat.

  No. Don’t think about that,she warns herself again.Let go.

  Pushing Pat, and his horrible gift-wrapped calling cards, from her mind, Brynn exchanges little Marie for the package in her husband’s hands.

  Hers tremble as she rips away the paper.

  She finds herself holding…

  “A book?” she asks, turning it over. “What is it?”

  The title isDead and Buried: American Postmortem Rituals .

  Puzzled, she looks at Garth. He gestures at the book again. She looks down, wondering if she missed something.

  Is he somehow trying to help her get over what happened to—

  Oh! All at once, she sees the author’s name emblazoned on the hardcover.

  “Garth Saddler,” she reads, and looks up in astonishment. “Oh, my God!”

  He grins, then nods, looking quite pleased with himself.

  “It’s your book! You sold it?”

  “I sold it. Not for a fortune…But it will be enough to keep Marie in diapers and the boys in peanut butter sandwiches for awhile.” He smiles and pulls her close with the arm that isn’t holding the baby. “And my publisher wants a proposal for another one.”

  “But…When did all this happen?”

  “I sent it out to a couple of publishers last fall, right before your birthday. Before…everything. I wanted it to be a surprise.”

  “And it sold. How did you manage to keep this a secret?”

  “It wasn’t easy. But I figured you wouldn’t mind if I kept this one, just until your birthday. I thought it would be the perfect present for the girl who has everything.”

  She laughs. “It is. I’m so happy for you, Garth. This is your dream.”

  “No,” he kisses the top of her head, and gestures at the baby snuggled in his arms and the room filled with family and friends, “thisis my dream.”

  “Mine, too.”

  Yes,thinks the girl who has everything,sometimes dreams—and birthday wishes—really do come true.

  ZEBRA BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  850 Third Avenue

  New York, NY 10022

  Copyright ' 2007 by Wendy Corsi Staub