The drive north wasn't the burden it once had been for her. She was going home and was soon lost in her thoughts about that day and the last weeks.

She hadn't told Eli everything that'd transpired recently, as much as she didn't like feeling she was keeping things from him. Early in December, Kate had purchased a shotgun to deal with varmints around her home and for personal security. Eli had come down for three days soon after—it'd been their last lengthy visit—and had taken her into the meadow for a series of long, grueling lessons. She afterward was confident she knew how to wield the weapon as it was intended and kept it locked in a narrow gun safe when not using it.

It was one purchase she'd swiftly come to realize was a prudent one.

Five days after Eli's last visit, Kate once again had met an unwelcome visitor at her home. On this occasion, she'd exited the barn mid-morning to encounter a thickset, hairy man in a tee shirt and cut-off jeans who was walking up the driveway from a white car parked near the bend in the drive seventy or so yards away. It'd reminded her so much of her encounter with Ted Phelps that she'd come to an instant halt.

For just a moment, the man, who'd been looking around carefully before catching sight of her, had registered the same surprise. But he quickly had adopted an unlikely story about having car trouble and hoping to use the phone. The hairs on the back of Kate's neck had stood straight up. The man's smile notwithstanding, there was something about him she'd instantly recognized wasn't right, and as he'd ambled toward her, speaking in a low and friendly tone and ignoring her repeated requests that he leave, the image of a handler attempting to gentle a horse for saddling had entered her mind.

The stranger's arrival had been so abrupt and alarming that she hadn't had the wits to react, and by the time she'd thought to retrieve her shotgun from the apartment, he was only twenty or twenty-five feet away. But as she'd bunched her muscles to race for the barn door, before she'd even moved, the lunkheaded hound had come bouncing out of the tall grass with its usual happy-go-lucky step. However, instead of blessing the guest with one of its overly intimate sniffs and slobbering hellos, the hound promptly had sunk its teeth into the back of the intruder's left thigh.

The interloper's scream had been like a starter's pistol for Kate, and she'd dashed inside, retrieved the weapon, and reemerged to see the trespasser, blood now flowing freely down his injured leg, cussing and lobbing hastily procured stones at the bobbing and weaving hound, who'd appeared to be laughing at the man's impotent tosses. It was then that Kate had realized she too was laughing.

Anyone ever having heard the sound of a 12-gauge shotgun shell being chambered mistakes that sound for nothing, so Kate's unwanted guest had high-tailed it to his car without looking back in her direction.

She'd called the police immediately, but then had turned to interrogate the pooch.

"So, it's you who's been my guardian-demon all along," she'd teased the harebrained hound as it stood, tail wagging and tongue lolling, cocking its head at her as it sometimes did. A brief analysis of the animal's vacuous eyes as she'd bent to chuck him under the chin dispelled that notion. "No. You're too stupid to keep from falling face-first into a hole .... But you're getting a steak anyway."

That was also the moment at which she'd realized she owned a dog.

Two days later, based largely on Kate's description of the man and his car, sheriff's deputies arrested the interloper for a series of rural burglaries. The decision not to share those facts with Eli had been easy to rationalize—it would have alarmed him for no reason—but there was something else of course, that nagging little doubt that some evil might befall the silly wretch who'd trespassed on her land.

She didn't believe any of the things about which she and Eli had spoken, half in jest, those weeks before. But ... but. Several people with whom she'd had unpleasant encounters in recent months had met with some mischief. The coincidence was just too much to ignore. She knew her reasoning was muddled on the point, but if Eli was unaware of any problem and the universe still chose to punish this Tate Villiers fellow, the man who the sheriff had arrested, at least she would possess a modicum of certainty it was the universe and not her best friend holding the knife.

There was no doubt she was being silly, but playing it safe and mentioning nothing of the affair to her friend was the only prudent course of action. And, anyway, the thought of Eli gloating about how he'd warned her of the dangers of living so far off the grid irked her, not that he would do such a thing.

The incident was yet another reminder of how much her life had changed. A year before, the notion of chasing an intruder from her property with a shotgun would have been ludicrous to her. And there were other things.

Julien had pointed out in a moment of candor, which were frequent for him, how much she'd changed in the years since they'd first worked together. He'd pronounced her always likeable and highly professional in the past, but now, well ... "so much more easygoing," had been the words he'd chosen.

And naturally her parents had latched onto how salty her language had become since they'd last seen her. That was something that worried her, but only a skosh. She never used to swear or use coarse language. Now, it was quite common, a manifestation of a new her for which she wanted to blame Eli. But that idea was bullsh ... nonsense. It was true that he swore, but only a bit more than most men she knew, and, of course, hearing her use such language amused him but largely because it was so out of character for her. At least it had been.

No. That new quirk in her personality was all her, and though she wasn't sure from whence it sprang, it was one part of the new her against which she intended to push back. Eli wasn't foulmouthed, and she didn't want him to think she was. No. Scratch that. She didn't want to think of herself in that way.

Along with her new penchant for cursing, she'd noticed other new eccentricities with which she'd vowed do away, ones that troubled her even more than her angry exclamations of 'butt-fucker' (the sole blue utterance she wasn't sure she could relinquish) directed against her former stepchildren.

Eli was always sweet and gentle with her in their playing and games, had never laid a finger on her, and had never called her anything more caustic than 'goofball,' which was a fair assessment of her behavior of late. So, she'd vowed to stop thumping on him and calling him 'dumbass' and the like. Her words were always meant in jest—it was clear he took them as such—but it was mean, and it wasn't her, at least not the her she wanted to be.

The ten days she spent at her folks' place had been complicated. It was the longest by far that she'd visited them in twenty years, and there'd been much soul-searching, and long talks with both mom and dad. Much of it had gone along those lines, asking important questions of who she was and who she wanted to be.

She'd decided through it all that she still liked Alice Caitlyn, only not as much as she thought she once had. The sweet, genteel, cultured Alice would still be the professional her, but just that: a stage name and public persona. She needed to give Kate Johnson a try. No ... more than a try. She was Kate Johnson. She just needed to spend some time figuring out who that was. It was a task before which all the trials she'd faced the past year—Otto's death, the estate, the step-kids, the Flying Guy, and her new life—all seemed feeble. But she was ready.

Those thoughts preoccupied her for the duration of her drive, and once she made it to the Santa Ynez Valley, she made a beeline for the Sanchez spread, where she had a short visit and dropped off some gifts.

Jan had looked after the animals while she was gone, but news that Kate had adopted the silly, itinerant hound had been met with some amusement and no small dram of skepticism even before her departure. Of course, the food the Jan had left daily for the hound was always eaten, but the lass seldom had seen the footloose pooch during Kate's absence.

It would often be thus. Kate's work was elsewhere, and the thought of how nice it would be having the hound with her in LA or elsewhere had crossed her mind, but only once and only briefly. The very idea of leaving that itinerant reprobate alone in an apartment or, God forbid, penned up in a kennel somewhere struck her as an obscenity more bitter than cancer. She'd never do that. Her work would take her away for weeks or even for months at a time, and the dog would come and go as he pleased. He was his own man.

But to Kate's surprise and joy, the animal met her when she arrived home, bouncing up in his usual lopsided stride and giving her an undignified sniff as greeting. Before she'd even unpacked, she checked on the horses and then spent some time playing with the dog. All seemed as it should at her home.

And then she found her Christmas present from Eli. He'd told her he would be up to drop it off, but a search of her tiny apartment yielded nothing. It was only when she glanced outside and saw a small structure that had not been there before that she understood. Right outside the back door was a tiny new building into which Eli had placed the two pieces of exercise equipment she'd salvaged from her LA home, her rower and Pilates table, along with several other odds and ends she needed to work out.

It was so extravagant that she teared up and immediately wanted to call and scold him, but resisted the urge until she'd calmed down. When she did call to thank him, he assured her it was a simple project that had taken little time and cost only slightly more than the price of dinner for four at one of the swanky restaurants of which she had once been an habitué.

His words soothed her as they often did, and after their affectionate goodbyes, she settled in and spent some time drawing up an outline of things she needed to do over the next three months. All the usual suspects were there, but at the very top, in thick block letters, she penned: GET OVER YOUR FEAR OF THE DARK.