“The flashbacks are going to keep happening. You may think you’ve managed to pull yourself together, but you haven’t. Soon you’ll shut down completely—and what will you do then? How are you going to protect yourself when you’ve regressed to the state you were in when we met?” Carson’s voice got hard and low. “Don’t ever forget how that cop looked at you when he found you in that basement, crouching over his partner’s dead body while a killer ran free. Or how you felt when you saw the gun just lying there and made the conscious decision to let an unconscionable monster walk. You could have stopped him. Given the families of those poor girls some peace. But you didn’t, Shay. You let him go.”

My heart hammered against my ribs. “Come home,” Carson said, softly now. “We’ll work through this, just like we did before. I’ll make it right. I always do.”

The speech was exactly what I expected from Carson. If I’d been just a smidge weaker, it might have worked.

“Tell me about Moonshine Phil.”

It was the question I’d been waiting to ask, and just as I’d hoped, it caught him off guard. It took longer than it should have for him to recover. “That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while,” he said. His laugh was synthetic, a cheap simulation of the real thing. “My ears are burning. Have you and Tim been gossiping behind my back? Don’t tell me you never broke the rules to have some fun.”

“Sure I did. But I never made a friend break the law. Philip Norton. He’s a local, like you. What do you know about his family?”

“What are you even talking about? I bought booze from the guy twenty years ago. What does any of this have to do with us? Christ,” he said after a beat, “this is Tim, too, isn’t it? What, is this Norton guy a suspect or something? Is Timmy trying to convince you I was friends with a criminal now?”

“You’re the one who negotiated that liquor deal. Did he talk about his family or not?”

“How am I supposed to remember that? We talked one time to set things up and Tim did the rest. You ask me, Tim was nuts to go anywhere near him. The pervert had a thing for young boys.”

“What? How could you know that?”

“I saw him around town a couple of times with a kid about our age. He wasn’t from our school. What does it matter? Moonshine Phil was a nobody. Just like Tim.”

“Tim,” I repeated, livid. “You could have ruined his career, his whole fucking life.” I suddenly remembered our text conversation, Carson’s abrupt decision to freeze Tim out. “That’s why you changed your mind about inviting him to the wedding. You’re afraid of what he’ll tell me about how you treated him.”

“Shana.” Carson loaded my name with displeasure, turned it into a reprimand. “If I was concerned about Tim Wellington, if I spent even a millisecond of my time thinking about what harebrained stories a pathetic, small-town cop might tell you about me, don’t you think I’d ban him from the guest list from the start? Wouldn’t I have explained myself preemptively if I thought he might try to bad-mouth me to my fiancée? You’ve been with the man almost every day for the past several months. If he had any power over me, believe me, he would have used it.”