“And she doesn’t tell anyone about it because she’s not sure you’ll like what she’s doing. She just wants to hear your mother out, to see if there’s any way to patch things up between you, because she thinks that’s what will ultimately be best for you, too.”

“Sounds like a psychiatrist, doesn’t it?” Amarok asked wryly.

“I have to admit it does.” Phil rolled his shoulders as if sleeping on the couch had given him a crick in his neck. “But how would Bishop know enough about your situation to think of that approach to begin with?”

“He was incarcerated at Hanover House for a while. You know how people talk.”

The way he pursed his lips showed skepticism. “Do the inmates know your background?”

“I’m sure some of the guards do.”

“How? Most of them are from Anchorage.”

Makita walked over and rested his muzzle in Amarok’s lap, and Amarok stroked him as he talked. “Quite a few hang out at the Moosehead after work, certainly enough to have heard people share just about anything. Bishop had to have come up with the information somehow.”

“No…” Phil shook his head.

“No, what?”

“It wasn’t at Hanover House or the Moosehead that he learned about the situation between you and your mother. It was that article.”

“What article?” Amarok’s mind had already shifted gears so he could launch into everything he had to do next.

“The one that uppity woman who came from New York City wrote for People magazine, remember?”

Amarok rocked back in his chair, which caused Makita to return to his bed. Of course! It had been big news when the man who’d tortured and nearly killed Evelyn Talbot was finally caught, which had thrust Amarok into the media circus, too, since he was the one to finally accomplish it. Everyone had been vying for the exclusive on the ending of the decades-long saga about the sixteen-year-old girl who turned into a psychiatrist driven to solve the mysteries of the psychopathic mind, thanks to the boy who’d once attacked her. Especially the big, national magazines.

Chloe Stokes, a top reporter for People, had stayed at The Shady Lady, the local motel, for over a week and had talked to just about everyone Amarok knew, including his father, once she went back to Anchorage to fly home. Amarok had thought she’d never leave Alaska. He’d tolerated her presence and her nosey questions, even played along to a degree, but only because Evelyn was so relieved to finally get some positive press for her work. To have people saying good things about her, that she got it right when everyone else missed the cues about Bishop, had been a welcome respite and stood in stark contrast to all the criticism she and her brainchild had endured since it opened—people saying that she was wasting government resources, that psychopaths could never be rehabilitated, that even if she was able to identify some differences in the brain between normal people and antisocial people, labeling someone as a psychopath and trying to extrapolate future behavior from that was a dangerous and touchy thing.