Willow Traynor’s eyes opened to the blackness of deep night as the noise and flash of an overbusy dream receded into the mist of her subconscious.

She held her breath as her eyes adjusted to the square edges of the dresser across the room, the dim reflection of light in the mirror, the ghostly drift of gauzy white curtains above the heat register. Something had awakened her.

She knew the dream had not been a nightmare, because in the past two years it seemed as if nightmares had become her constant companions. She would have recognized the aftereffects. She didn’t feel them now—no racing heart, no night sweats, no rush of relief upon waking to discover that she was still alive.

Something else, then. A noise? Perhaps a passing car, or a boat on the lake? The neighbors in the apartment complex? Sometimes the two little Jameson girls got rambunctious late at night, and Mrs. Bartholomew in the unit next door to them called to complain.

Willow sat up and peered toward the small digital numbers on the nightstand clock. Two-thirty, April 1. Probably wasn’t the children.

It might be something as insignificant as the unfamiliar silence. Even after two weeks she hadn’t yet adjusted to the move—or rather, the escape—from bustling Kansas City to her brother’s rural log cabin six miles south of Branson in the Missouri Ozarks. Major change.

She had never lived this far out in the country. Although the eight-unit apartment lodge her brother managed meant they weren’t exactly isolated from civilization, it was nothing like city life. Living in the cabin, situation on the shore of Table Rock Lake, was more like being on permanent vacation. Willow still struggled to come to grips with the comparative solitude.

As she stared into darkness, the square of sliding glass door at the far end of her room seemed to emit a pulsing glow. She blinked to clear her vision, but the glow increased. Headlights from a boat on the lake, perhaps? Except she heard no sound of a boat motor.

She turned her back to the light and plumped her pillow. “None of my business, anyway,” she whispered into the darkness.

Her brother, Preston, certainly didn’t want her help keeping track of the renters. As he’d told her several times in the past two weeks, she needed to take a break and heal.

After a little more than twenty-three months, she’d almost given up hope of that. True, she no longer relived the night she’d received the visit from the police chief to tell her that her husband had been killed in the line of duty. At least, she didn’t relive it every single night. Maybe more like once a week now.

And she no longer had the nightly awakenings to cries of her forever unborn child. Only a couple of times a week did she cringe when someone invaded her personal space.