“I’ve already found a match for the handwriting,” the detective said, glancing at the clock on the wall. It was 12:37. If he’d been up all night, he’d had more than eight hours to investigate the evidence found at the scene of the crime. “Some of your teachers were nice enough to let me borrow your school essays this morning, and it didn’t take long to figure out which one of you wrote this.” Resting his elbows on the table, he looked into her eyes. “Anything you want to tell me?”

She met his gaze, unflinching. “I didn’t do this.”

“I know you didn’t, Jack. But the girl who did was alone last night, wasn’t she? You’re just pretending you slept over at her house.”

“I’m not pretending.”

“You think you’re looking out for her, like you always looked out for Raven. Yeah, I remember you,” he added, his gaze softening. “Your hair was wilder three years ago, and you called yourself Poppy, but I remember your visit to the station. I remember every story you told.”

“I wasn’t telling stories,” Jack snapped, sinking farther into her jacket. “Everything I told you was true.”

“You told me Raven had a wicked stepmother. You told me she was hurting him. But when I brought Raven down to the station, we couldn’t find any evidence of abuse, and he swore his stepmother never touched him.”

“She didn’t have to touch him! She made him want to lie down in the dirt. She made him want to die.”

“How?”

“We didn’t figure that part out.” Jack’s heart pulsed against her ribs. She hated talking about Raven, and how sick he’d gotten after his stepmother had moved in. She hated thinking about it. “We just knew that she was scaring him. Making him want to hurt himself. A few weeks after she moved into that house, he started to hear his mom’s voice in the middle of the night.”

“It’s not uncommon for victims of loss to experience hallucinations. Especially someone so young.”

“He wasn’t hallucinating. One night, I snuck over to his house to see what was happening. I climbed up the ivy that led to Raven’s bedroom, and I looked through the window, and…”

“What?” the detective asked, his eyebrows knitting together. A wrinkle formed between them. “What did you see, Jack?”