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“As your not attorney, I would also advise you that should this man suddenly go… missing, the rightful marital assets would still go to the wife.” He paused, fiddling with an expensive-looking pen on his desk. “Repayment, of sorts, for all the pain and suffering.”

Most criminal attorneys had to have a moral compass that didn’t quite point true north. I imagined that compass was even more askew when you worked at a fixer firm.

Then again, I imagined Ethan saw a shit ton of women in bad situations with rich men and very few ways out. All that ugliness, it had to make you start to think about missing men in unmarked graves in the woods.

“Good to know,” I said. “Thanks for your time. I just wanted to get my facts straight before I spoke on this like I knew what I was talking about.”

“Anytime. And if this woman needs more of a shark to deal with this situation, you know where to find me.”

“Thanks, man,” I said, shaking his hand before making my way back down the hallway toward the reception area.

“Where the hell are you?” the girl at the desk mumbled to herself as she dug through stacks of paperwork, knocking two folders onto the floor, papers scattering everywhere. Something she didn’t even respond to as she just kept searching. “There you are!” she said, throwing the paper in the air. Then, spotting me, looked a little bashful. “I thought I lost the lunch order,” she explained.

“Day saved. Need some help with the papers?”

“What paper—oh. She exhaled hard. “No, thank you. Does Rosie need me to set anything up for you?”

“No,” I said, glad I didn’t have to add to her workload.

“Well, I’d say I hope to see you again, but most people end up here when their lives are in shambles and they’re desperate. So, I hope I don’t see you again,” she said as she dropped down to gather the papers. I went ahead and didn’t mention that she was mixing the papers into the wrong folders as I walked back outside.

My shoulders felt lighter as I walked down toward my bike, glad to have answers to give Georgie when she asked questions.

My phone rang in my pocket.

Reaching for it, I saw Briggs’s name there.

Weird.

“Hey, man, I’m about to head back.”

Then he said two words that made it feel like the world opened up beneath my feet.

“Georgie’s missing.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Georgie

I was eight pages into sketches for possible mugs for the club members I knew already.

I won’t lie; I was more than a little overwhelmed at the sheer number of people I had yet to meet—people I would need to get to know well enough to make perfectly personalized mugs for.

My circle had been so small for so long.

But just underneath the impossibility of it, was the excitement. Because I’d been around this club long enough now that this was the most inviting, open, caring group of people I’d ever met. Janet and Jill aside.

I, for one, couldn’t wait to be invited to a talent show—listening to a group of five-year-olds sing out of key for three hours—or be entrusted with babysitting, dragged up to Hailstorm to scale the obstacle course, brought on a girls’ club trip to the self-defense gym to spar, or be tapped on the shoulder to help a meal train for a sick or postpartum loved one.

There was so much to look forward to.

“And for the penis test,” I said to myself as I picked up my sketchpad and turned it all around, searching for any accidental penis shapes that sometimes snuck into a design. Boobs, too.

I’d just set the notebook back down, satisfied that there was nothing unintentional in the design, when my phone started to ring.

I expected to see Cain’s name, since he’d been gone for a while already. Or Janet or Jill, since they were still checking in constantly.

But it was none of them.