My adrenaline rushes back, flushes my face, and I sit up straight. I know the conversation must be civil. Any shouting or emotional outbursts will bring the visit to an end, so I swallow and take a deep breath.

“Keith,” I say. His eyes are sunken and rheumy. His face as thin and lined as that of a man in his eighties, although he’s only forty-seven. His body a shrunken shell. The Keith Russell who has haunted my dreams for twenty-nine years is young, tall, lanky, and strong, a monster with protruding eyes and sharp teeth. But this man has become something else.

Child killers don’t fare well in prison. As the lowest of the low, they are often attacked by other inmates, sometimes killed. Keith’s mottled, skinny arms are scarred, and near his neck is something that looks like a healed knife wound. He’s been diminished physically over the years, and I stretch myself up taller in my seat as my pulse slowly eases down.

“It’s nice to see you.” He smiles again, his mouth a dark hole of missing teeth.

I draw a breath. My voice wavers. “It’s not nice to see you, Keith.”

“Then why did you come?” His voice grates. “No one comes to see me, now that my mother’s dead, except my miserable brother when the mood strikes him.” A shadow passes across his face, and he shakes his head like a dog might.

“It’s not a social call.”

His eyes—a light amber brown, all that remains of his physical self that hasn’t changed—bore into mine. Then he drops his gaze to my left arm, and I instinctively cover the spot under my sleeve with my right hand. I hear him chuckle and curse myself for falling into his trap. He’s looking for his mark, the brand he carved into my tender flesh with his pocketknife all those years ago. KR. He marked me as his possession.

When I was a teenager, Corrine took me to a dermatologist, whose laser treatments reduced the scar to a few faint ripples on my skin. But both Keith and I know it was there. I feel my breath flutter, catch in my chest.

“They might let me out, one day,” he says, nibbles a fingernail.

“I doubt that.” He’d been given life without the possibility of parole.

He only nods. Then leans forward. “I didn’t kill Indie,” he whispers. “I didn’t kill anybody.”