This had to be a mistake. They had to be looking for someone else, and I felt my chance at freedom slipping away. Restore a mural? In two months? First, I had no experience in art conservation, and second, I’d worked on exactly one mural in my nearly three years in college and that had been a simple four-by-eight-foot abstract I’d painted with another student my freshman year. “Are you sure he meant me?” I asked.

“Definitely.”

“Why does he … why would he think I’m ‘uniquely qualified’ to do this?” I asked, remembering the phrase. “How did he even know I exist?”

“Who knows?” Lisa said, obviously annoyed by her father’s eccentricities. “All I know is you’re now my problem.”

I bristled at her attitude, but kept my mouth shut. If the two of them could actually help me get out of here, I couldn’t afford to alienate them.

“I suppose he thought you were qualified by virtue of your art education,” Andrea said. “You were an art major, correct?”

I nodded. I’d been an art major, yes, but that had nothing to do with restoration. Restoration required an entirely different set of skills from the creation of art. Plus, I hadn’t been the most dedicated student that last year. I’d let myself get sucked in by Trey instead of my studies. He’d absorbed my time and energy. I’d been nauseatingly smitten, drawn in by his attention and the future we were planning together. He’d told me about his late grandmother’s engagement ring, hinting that it would soon be mine. I’d thought he was so wonderful. Pre-law. Sweet. Amazing to look at. I’d been a fool. But I knew better than to say anything about lack of qualifications to these two women when they were talking about getting me out of here.

“So … where’s this mural?” I asked.

“In Edenton. You’d have to live in Edenton,” Lisa said. “With me. My house—my father’s house, actually—is big. We won’t be tripping over each other.”

I could barely believe my ears. I’d not only get out of prison but I’d live in Jesse Jameson Williams’s house? I felt the unexpected threat of tears. Oh God, how I needed to get out of here! In the last miserable year, I’d been bruised, cut, and battered. I’d learned to fight back, yes, but that was not who I was. I was no brawler. My fellow inmates mocked me for my youth, my slender build, my platinum hair. I lived in a state of perpetual fear. Even in my cell, I felt unsafe. My cellmate was a woman who didn’t talk. Literally. I’d never heard a word from her mouth, but her expression carried disdain. I barely slept, one eye open, expecting to have my throat slit with a stolen knife sometime during the night.