Next to Miles, Flynn reminded me of a circus bear. He ate noisily and didn’t bother to wipe the soup from his mustache, but his facial hair and clothing were lavish enough that I suspected he, like Ned, enjoyed standing out. When Flynn and I made eye contact, he radiated anger. I noticed he wasn’t trying to hide the bruises on his hand anymore. Nobody else at the table gave his swollen knuckles a second glance.

I set down my spoon to wipe my own mouth, and was surprised to see it quiver in the bowl. Glancing to my left, I saw Abella’s eyebrows knotted in concentration as she tried to lift a spoonful of broth to her lips. On the other side of her, Ned whispered something in her ear and took her hand under the table.

If Abella had lied to me, she was a convincing actress. While her boyfriend’s family slurped chicken, fennel, and farro soup all around her, the girl’s knees shook so violently I thought she might fall off her chair.

TWELVE

There was no question as to what Tim and I would do when Norton cleared the table. Tim immediately escorted the family back to the parlor, where he would tackle the dual challenge of distracting an increasingly impatient lot and counting the stylized flowers on the Persian rug. Buoyed by a full belly—the Sinclairs’ caretaker was an excellent cook—I retraced Abella’s footsteps to the kitchen, out the mudroom door, and across the yard.

The October air was raw and cold and the rain pummeled me from all sides. If I didn’t have a slicker of my own, I’d have been soaked through in seconds. High above me the treetops thrashed like barbed whips and I heard the telltale crack of a splitting branch. I picked up the pace, careful on the dicey rocks, and hoped a falling tree wasn’t about to cleave me in half.

As I trudged through the muck with boots squelching and mud splattering the backs of my knees, I thought about Jasper. I imagined him beyond the island’s stone wall, bleeding and battered by ice-cold waves. I saw him lying pale and still among tall trees as rain pooled in his unseeing eyes. In my mind, Jasper was no longer breathing. Thinking of him like that kept me going. No way would I get lazy or careless if I invited that image to haunt me today.

My destination was the shed, but as soon as I got far enough from the house to see all three stories, I pivoted and planted my feet. Counting windows, I figured out which ones were Jasper’s. I hadn’t been wrong about his little Juliet balcony. Not only was there no staircase, ladder, or tree nearby, but the first-floor roof wasn’t close enough to give someone a leg up either. Whatever his condition when he left his bedroom, Jasper did it through a door.

I walked on, around the perimeter of the house over squishy moss and blue rocks that stuck up like fangs. There were no other access points to the second floor, no signs of forced entry to the cellar door, which was almost invisible, flush with the ground.