Chapter 16 — The Ring

Rennick was captured two counties away before the week was out, hiding in a motel with a bag of cash and my mother’s old wedding ring in his pocket.

That detail — the wedding ring, carried by the man my mother chose over her husband — was the one that made Detective Kingsbury look at my mother’s hospital records differently, and made me understand the shape of the whole thing at last.

My mother had not been Rennick’s victim, coerced and frightened.

She had been his partner.

She had worn my father’s ring to a funeral she staged and then given it, somewhere along the way, to the man she buried him for.