Free Stay With Me by Alison Gaylin

was that young girl, a girl Maya’s age, shedding a few tears over a romantic film. A girl in a movie theater with her friends, a normal child, completely unaware that her life was about to be destroyed by that nice lady on her date night—that lady who told her it was okay to cry.
    Faith made herself say, “I’m gonna ask you a few questions about the house.” But she couldn’t wait until her fifteen minutes with Ashley were up, and she could escape. I’m so lucky , Faith thought. I need to be more grateful . And she wanted to show it. She wanted to take off this thick TV makeup and hurry home to her apartment and to her beautiful little family. She wanted to feel her husband’s arms around her—have a date night of her own. But first she wanted to catch Maya before she went to Zoe’s for her sleepover. She just had to hug that sweet girl for all she was worth.

 
    5
    Alan Dufresne wasn’t lying about his father. On one of the computers in the Plaza Garden Suites business center, he logged into his e-mail and showed Brenna the correspondence he’d exchanged four months after his father’s July death with the credit department of WeKeep Storage in Provo, Utah, the representative informing him that Roland Dufresne had indeed maintained a space there since October 2, 1981.
    “My mother had no idea he’d even been to Provo,” Alan told Brenna. “She asked me to go there and open it. I have two other brothers but out of all of us, I was closest to my dad.”
    “So you did.”
    Alan gave Brenna a look, as though traveling from his home in Sacramento, California, to Provo on a moment’s notice to check out the contents of a storage space was a no-brainer, which, of course when Brenna thought about it, it was.
    “What was your mom afraid she’d find in it?”
    He shrugged. “Gifts from some secret girlfriend probably.”
    “Nothing worse?”
    Alan turned to Brenna, the saucer eyes deep and sad. “My dad was a truck driver. He was gone a lot of the time, and you know what they say about truckers on the road. But he wouldn’t hurt anyone. My mom knew that and so did . . . I still know that. My dad was a great father and a good man.”
    He’d already said that—not to Brenna but to the person who’d been writing him for the past two weeks, claiming to be her. I know it sounds bad, Brenna. But my dad wouldn’t hurt anyone. He was a great father and a good man.
    He’d shown Brenna those e-mails first—a steady exchange of them, increasingly friendly and confidential, between himself and [email protected]. It was not Brenna’s e-mail address—she’d never had a Hotmail account. But her middle name did begin with the letter N. And sitting there behind the closed glass door of the hotel business center, reading the e-mails one by one, the real Brenna Nicole Spector had felt as though the floor beneath her had dropped away, and she was sinking into something thick and deep and inhospitable. A quicksand of confusion. It had become hard for her to breathe. It was hard still.
    This person knew things about Brenna. Personal things. I know you’ve never met my assistant, Trent , she’d said in one e-mail, but trust me. He’s a real character. In another, she noted that she had “a very close friend” on the police force in Tarry Ridge. In several she mentioned Maya. Most of the information, of course, could have been gleaned from the media over the past couple of months.
    But not all of it.
    Brenna’s eyes were focused on the credit department e-mail, but her mind was scrolling back, into a memory from just fifteen minutes ago, of reading the sixth and final e-mail from BrennaNSpector, sent just yesterday . . .
    Alan, I know how hard that must have been for you—discovering that your father kept secrets. My father kept secrets, too. He tried to be a good father, and I remember him that way. But I’ve since found out he was deeply disturbed. A sad, sick man . . .
    Brenna whispered, “How