Chapter 4

I said, "You made a wish on that cigarette."

My words came down on Edward like a bucket of ice water, and every frantic motion in his body froze where it was.

His hand slid off my arm before he even realized he had let go.

He stood there like a statue carved out of plaster. Every trace of color drained out of his face.

His eyes caught the reflection of my face. The face looking back at him was cold and heavy with contempt.

Helen braced her hand against the edge of the table and barely kept her feet under her. She looked at me with pure disbelief. Then she turned that same look on Edward.

Her voice broke as she tried to get the words out. "Made a wish? Lily, sweetheart. What kind of nonsense is this. Your father would never—"

Her words were coming out in broken pieces now. Everything she had ever believed about her world was crumbling underneath her.

Patrick traded a heavy look with his colleagues across the table.

None of them said a word, but their professional instincts told them that what I was about to say might sit right at the heart of the whole case.

The air in the conference room pressed down harder than it had a moment before.

It felt like an invisible hand had closed around every throat in the room.

I paid no attention to any of them.

My eyes stayed locked on Edward the way a scalpel stays on a cut, working across his face inch by inch.

I wanted to see just how long he could keep the mask in place.

I held my voice steady. "Thirteen years ago, you were thirty years old.

"You had been working at that little textile mill of ours for almost ten years, just another guy on the floor pulling piece-rate wages that barely covered anything.

"Every night at the dinner table, you griped about it. You called the plant manager blind. You called the foreman a lowlife. You kept saying your whole life was already locked in, and you could see the end of the road from exactly where you were standing."

Edward blanched more with every word I said.

All of it was the same complaining he used to grind through day after day back then. Every word of it came straight from the bitterness and the hunger he had carried around, buried under his skin.

Helen listened as a conflicted expression washed over her face.

She had heard those exact complaints countless times before.

The immense hardship of the thirteen years since Lily disappeared had forced her to forget Edward's true nature.

I said, "You were jealous of the neighbors. Their son got into college and made them proud, and you'd always hold me up against him.

"Said I was useless 'cause I was a girl. Said I'd just cost the family money when I got married off someday.

"You'd come home drunk and hit me. Called me a worthless burden. You forget all that?"

Edward's lips began to tremble. He wanted to argue back, but could not force out a single word.

Every single thing I said was the absolute truth.

Helen swayed on her feet as the light slowly faded from her eyes.

She finally remembered the past events she had intentionally chosen to ignore.

She recalled Edward's constant complaining, his obvious disgust for me, and his drunken beatings.

She had convinced herself back then that those actions were just the normal venting of a deeply frustrated man.

"You got completely drunk again on the night before my abduction," I continued. "You were furious because the manager at the plant gave a promotion to someone else instead of you.

"You came home and flipped the dining table over. You pointed right at my face and blamed me for being a dead weight. You screamed that you would have gotten ahead in life if you did not have me.

"You actually told me that your life would be perfect without a useless girl dragging you down. Then I completely disappeared the very next afternoon."

My voice remained perfectly calm, yet every single word pierced right through him.

Edward's mental defenses completely collapsed under the weight of my story.

Cold sweat beaded on his forehead and rolled down his cheeks. He leaned his hands heavily against the table, but his arms were shaking uncontrollably.

Patrick caught those subtle details and signaled the officer beside him to activate the body camera.

"Lauren, you mentioned he made a wish. What exactly did he wish for?" Patrick steered the conversation back on track.