“Emily, could you come here a second? I have a quick question.” Emily smiles at Paige as she gets out of her seat. Paige isn’t even looking. I’m grateful for her concentration now. Grateful that she wants this single marshmallow to be the most perfect marshmallow in history. Grateful for Beau, who hasn’t let on that there’s any problem. Emily gets closer, and I hold up the note. “Did you see this?”

“No.” Fear flashes in her eyes. “I brought the mail inside earlier. She must have looked through the stack. If it was addressed to her she would have opened it.”

I shiver. It feels like Joe has infiltrated the party, even though I know he’s in jail. He might have friends who are still on the force, but they’re not going to let him walk free to do this. Goose bumps fan out on my shoulders. We have plenty of security. There’s no need to feel like he’s sneaking around in the woods, hovering just out of sight.

Emily takes the envelope from my hand and turns it right-side up. “This isn’t his handwriting.” She keeps her voice low so there’s no chance it carries. A shiver moves down my spine.

“It’s not?”

“No.” Emily traces the letter on the page as if to verify for herself that it’s really not her brother’s handwriting. “No, it’s definitely not. Someone else wrote this.”

“Do you still think this gift was from him?”

Emily looks over her shoulder and scans across the entire yard. Now that she’s done it, I take my own turn checking behind my back. There’s no one in Emily’s kitchen. Joe isn’t standing at the patio door with a crazed look in his eyes. The expensive security didn’t let him slip past, and neither did the warden at the jail. I remember how haunted Emily looked when I first met her. How desperate. She’d followed me to Houston in a bid to get her daughter back, and this note, this gift—it’s brought back an element of that haunting.

“Okay,” Emily says softly. She closes her eyes and takes a few deep breaths. “Okay. Yes. I think this gift is from him. He knows when Paige’s birthday is, and he knows enough about her to send it. But he’s obviously covering his tracks.”

“What do you mean? He left a note.” Or he instructed someone else to leave the note.

“A note that’s not his handwriting,” Emily points out. “He wants us to know it was him, but he still has plausible deniability. It would be hard to trace this back to him.”

We both look at the top hat. It’s small and unassuming and a little bit cute.