“He’s going to tell you to go to hell,” she said. “You’re going to be sitting right back here, ninety seconds from now, asking yourself why you bothered. And then you’re going to spend the rest of your life pissed off that you gave him the satisfaction.”

She leaned back hard into her seat. The movement set the bobble-head Chewbacca on her dashboard nodding. Subtle but sure agreement.

“I know,” Danica said, then opened the car door anyway.

By habit, she reached for her phone in the console tray—but it wasn’t there. An hour into the drive down from Oregon, she’d had a flash of paranoia: someone who could send people to kidnap her might also be able to get the GPS data from her phone. She had left it in the tall grass next to a freeway mile marker, wrapped up airtight in one of her plastic shopping bags, all the while telling herself she’d lost her mind. Feeling much the same way now, she got out of the car.

She rang the doorbell and stepped back to wait. She turned at the edge of the porch and let her gaze take in the street.

This stretch of Stockton Canyon, the land flaring out wide like a small lake along the path of a river, was full of mid-twentieth-century houses arrayed in a grid of streets. A little pocket suburb tucked away in the high country above Thousand Oaks.

The trees were bigger than she remembered. There was more shade. The wind sounded different, singing through the leaves.

Behind her, the front door clicked and swung open.

She turned.

Carl Gilmore wore the same glasses frames he’d had nineteen years earlier. The eyes behind them were different—bleary and yellowed, surrounded by folds of skin that had been smooth before. The eyes narrowed at her for a second. Then they widened.

“Dani?”

He didn’t tell her to go to hell. He stepped back and waved her in. She slipped past him into the entry hall; her first breath plunged her right back to high school and all the summers she’d spent here during college. Every house had its smell, like a fingerprint. This one was a mixture of Pine-Sol and Gain and whatever Carl used to seal the leather couch in the family room. The couch was still there; she could see it from the hall.

Carl shut the door and turned to her. His mouth worked to say something, but he kept stopping.

“Can we sit down and talk?” Danica asked.

They sat on the leather couch and she went through it in detail—everything that had happened from the moment she’d walked into the grocery store in Brookings at two in the morning.