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“Hey, someday you too will discover the joy of organization. Or maybe you just like having a thousand emails in your inbox.”

“My search skills are top-notch.”

She finds the email and, yes, it’s easier than it would have been on her phone, though she’d never admit it. She’d also never admit how much she loves that she has Caleb’s phone passcode and he has no problem with her checking his email or texts. She’s gone out with guys who’d angle their phones away whenever they read messages, which was such a red flag.

“Okay,” she says as she opens the email. “We take exit 92 off the highway.”

“Which we did.”

“Then drive ten miles north.”

“Uh…”

She reaches to tap the dashboard compass, which shows them heading north.

“Ah,” Caleb says. “But now for the million-dollar question. Can your fancy car tell us whether we’ve gone ten miles since the exit?”

“Only if we checked the odometer at the time. Which I would actually have done if I had any idea we could lose the map.” She peers out the rain-dappled side window. “The only turnoff I’ve seen on my side was shortly after we exited.”

“Not to mock your sense of direction, but the lake—and therefore the cabin—would be on my side.”

“Mmm, are you sure? You did get it cheap. ‘Lakeside’ could mean ‘can see the lake if you stand on the roof.’”

“With trees this thick, the cabin would still need to be on my side for that. And I haven’t seen so much as a driveway.”

Noemi checks her phone again. Still no signal and no map.

“We should get a signal soon,” he says. “When we do, we check the map, and if we’ve passed the place, we’ll turn around. At least the road is empty.”

No drunk drivers, he means. Even before the accident, driving on empty roads always made Noemi nervous. That may have had something to do with the fact that she’d had a stalker as a teen, and more than once she’d looked into her rearview mirror to see his truck behind her.

The thought makes her stomach twist, and it makes her angry too, at the way this is just another experience in her life, something girls talk about the way they talk about catching mono.

Oh, you had a stalker. Me, too. What was yours like?

Their stalkers had all been guys they’d once dated or guys who’d wanted to date them. Noemi’s had been a grown-ass man, who’d cornered her when she was fifteen and told her to go back to her country. Which was … America? Her family had been here long enough that her great-grandparents told stories about the Japanese internment camps.

When the guy started stalking her, she decided she was just going to ignore his brand of bullshit. Then came the day he broke into her dad’s home while she was there alone and …

Noemi swallows. Everyone said she was lucky to have gotten away before “anything happened” but having a stranger walk into your house? In the middle of the day? With a knife? Telling you what he wants to do to you?

Getting away was lucky, but it wasn’t as if “nothing had happened.” Years later, she still couldn’t stand to be alone at home, and she once had to drop a class because the prof looked too much like her stalker.

Noemi clears her throat. “So, what are our weekend plans?”

Caleb half glances her way, brow raised.

She swats his arm. “Besides that.”

“Oh, that is my weekend plan. Nothing but— Shit!”

He slams on the brakes as something appears in their headlights. The back end of a vehicle. The ABS kicks in, and the car seems like it’s going to stop in time. It should stop in time. But it feels as if something crashes into them from the rear, ramming them into the back end of a pickup. The airbags deploy, engulfing Noemi from all sides.

“Noemi?” Caleb’s voice rises. “Noemi!”

“I’m fine,” she manages as she catches her breath, struggling against the deflating airbags.

It takes a moment to realize she’s been in an accident. And then everything from the last one rushes back, right on the heels of what she’d been thinking about the stalker and—