Jack nodded, her stomach growling loudly as if on cue. Lily giggled as she unlocked the door to her mother’s practice. She would keep things light, and she would keep offering snacks and encouragement, and she’d learn exactly why Jack had tossed Raven’s clothing into the fire.

The door clicked open, and Lily ushered Jack inside the little brick house that had been converted into an office. There was an immediate beeping as the security system blared out its siren song, but Lily silenced it by typing the code into the keypad by the door.

Zero-three-zero-four.

Lily’s birthday. For the second time that night, she felt a stirring in her chest. Something soft and unexpected, like a trickle inside a well that has been dried up for a very long time.

She didn’t flick on a light. Instead, she pulled up the flashlight on her phone, striding over to her mother’s desk. It was a white antique affair with roses painted up the legs, pink blossoms unfurling from thorny stems. Lily sat down in the matching chair. She was wearing gloves, but they were as pale as the roses stenciled onto the desk, disappearing under the sleeves of her sweater.

In the darkness they looked a lot like her hands.

“Want to check the filing cabinet?” Lily asked, tossing Jack her mother’s keys. Jack caught them easily. “We could be here all night.”

“What, exactly, are we looking for?” Jack flipped through the keys, looking for one that was small enough to unlock the cabinet.

“Look for anything suspicious.” Lily woke up the computer with a brush of her fingers. Within seconds she was poring over her mother’s inbox, sifting through a mix of appointment confirmations and messages from Raven’s dad. Both were incredibly dull. The confirmations were automated, and the more personal emails contained grocery lists or questions about dinner. Lamb or pork? The Italian place they’d visited a dozen times or the French bistro down the street? Lily sighed, her eyes glazing as she scrolled through the first hundred emails. “Maybe one of her clients got a little too close to her,” she suggested to Jack, who was flipping through files at her back. “I know it’s a long shot, but—”

“It’s not a long shot.”

Lily jumped as Jack dropped a file onto the desk. They’d been searching for only a few minutes, but already Jack had found something. The file was fat, overflowing with pages and the edges of photographs. But none of that held Lily’s attention. No, her eyes were glued to the name on the side of the file, the name she’d seen over and over again in her mother’s emails.

Stefan Holloway.