Chapter 3

My voice was trembling with rage, not fear.

This was the rage that had burrowed deep into my bones, the rage of a daughter cast aside by her own family.

"He had his hand clamped over my mouth, and I couldn't make a single sound. But I saw him."

I opened my eyes and looked at Edward again.

"He was standing a little ways off, right under a utility pole. He had on the blue coveralls he'd changed into that morning. There was a burn hole on the chest, right where a cigarette ember had eaten through the fabric.

"He had a Marlboro Red hanging from his mouth. I remember the smell of those. Our whole house always smelled that way.

"He just stood there looking at me, and his face was completely blank. I kept reaching out for him, begging him to come save me. But he just watched, taking one drag after another."

By the time I reached that part, Edward's face had gone past pale. It had turned the color of ash, the color of something already dead.

His lips were trembling, and he was trying to say something, but no sound came out.

Helen had frozen too.

The details I had given were too specific to have been invented—blue coveralls, a burn hole on the chest, Marlboro Reds. They were real enough to crack the belief she had built her entire life around.

She stared at her husband in a daze, her eyes full of confusion and silent questions.

Patrick's expression had gone grim, and he pressed further. "Then what? When the van drove off, what did he do?"

I drew in a long breath and said the thing I had kept buried in me all those years, the one detail I had never been able to let go of.

"Right before the van door slammed shut, I watched him take the cigarette out of his mouth. He took one last hard drag off it. The cigarette was already burned almost down to the filter."

"Then he flicked the butt away with his thumb. It traced a tiny red arc through the air. And it landed dead center on the van's left rear tire, not an inch off target."

Then the van drove away. It took the next thirteen years of my life along with it."

I finished.

The conference room fell dead silent.

Edward swayed harder this time, and he caught himself against the edge of the table before he could go down.

His eyes shot wide and locked on me. The wound act he'd been putting on drained right out of them.

What was left was pure, naked panic.

Helen's legs gave out from under her. The officer beside her caught her by the arm and held her steady.

Her eyes never left Edward's. Her mouth moved before the sound caught up, the words slipping out like she was speaking to herself. "Did you really go in to work that afternoon?"

Her voice shook, thin with a doubt she could not keep down.

A single detail could have been written off as faulty memory. But a whole string of them, this clear and this precise, was enough to shatter any trust that had ever existed between us.

Patrick did not press Edward for another answer.

He turned to the officer beside him and gave a few quiet instructions under his breath.

Then he walked over to where I was standing and lowered his voice.

He said, "Lauren, what you've given us matters. We're going to put a task force together right away and reopen this case from thirteen years ago. You have my word. No matter who turns out to be involved, nobody walks away from this one."

He paused, then added, "Until we have answers, we'd like to set you up somewhere safe. It's for your protection, and it makes the investigation easier on our end. Are you willing to come with us?"

I nodded. "Yes."

I did not want to spend one more second in that so-called home.

Just as I was about to follow Patrick toward the door, Edward rushed at us like something had broken loose inside him. "You can't let her leave!"

He grabbed my arm, and his grip was shockingly strong. "She's my daughter. She's not thinking straight. You can't listen to a word she's saying. She has to come home with me."

His reaction was too violent. Something in the intensity of it felt deeply wrong.

Patrick stepped forward at once and, together with another officer, pulled him off me. "Mr. Warren, I need you to calm down. Don't interfere with police business."

Edward kept his grip clamped on my arm. His eyes were bloodshot, and the fear swimming in them was a kind I knew too well.

He was afraid.

He was afraid I would slip out of his sight. He was afraid I would let out more of the secrets he had worked so hard to bury.

I watched him come apart in front of me, and the frozen ground I had packed down inside my chest split open without warning.

Something came back to me in that moment.

It was a small detail about that cigarette butt, one I had buried for thirteen years along with everything else.

I looked at him and let my voice turn cold. "Dad, have you forgotten? Right before you flicked that cigarette away, you stopped and made a wish on it."