For a second—a half second, maybe less—I considered asking her when she had first sent him her picture. Had it been late in the game, maybe right after she received this e-mail? I know how cruel that sounded, but I had seen the way Jared looked at Rachel.

Was that it? Was the answer that simple—and that superficial?

I started thinking about that again and now my emotions turned back to rage at Jared Lowell.

But I stayed quiet.

“He may still be in danger,” Ema said. “He could be covering something up. He could be trying to protect me.”

“Protect you how?”

“There was something going on in his life. Something he was trying to get away from so that he could be with me. But suppose he couldn’t? Suppose he tried to but, whatever it was, he couldn’t escape it.”

We sat there in silence. Finally I asked, “What was he trying to escape?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But maybe we still need to find out.”

CHAPTER 32

It was dark when I headed home. Niles offered me a ride, but I wanted to walk. I needed to clear my head. The walk home would do me good. Ema’s house was not only ginormous but it sat atop a ginormous plot of land. I started down a driveway that had to be a quarter mile long.

When I reached the bottom of the hill, I spotted the familiar car across the street. It was black with tinted windows. Its license plate number was A30432. During the Holocaust, prisoners in Auschwitz had numbers tattooed on their arms. Lizzy Sobek had survived that death camp. Her tattoo number?

A30432.

The car was here for me. I didn’t walk toward it. I would let them make the first move.

The back door opened. The man I had called Shaved Head stepped out. He wore a dark suit and tie. I knew now that his name was Dylan Shaykes. As a young child, curly-haired Dylan Shaykes had vanished, never to be seen again. I didn’t know what happened or how he had joined Abeona, but he had been watching me from the beginning.

The black car drove away, leaving Dylan alone on the street with me.

“Funny thing,” I called to him.

“What?”

“I’ve never seen the driver. Who is he?”

Dylan didn’t answer. I didn’t expect him to. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.