“It isn’t what I saw. It’s what I heard. Her voice was trickling through the room, soft as a whisper. I’d recognize it anywhere. It was Raven’s mom, who’d died a year earlier. She was asking him to join her. She was saying she couldn’t do this alone, and she needed her little boy.” Jack swallowed, taking a breath. “It scared me so badly, I fell into the rosebushes underneath Raven’s window. I still have the scars,” she added, pulling up the sleeve of her jacket.

The detective frowned, eyeing the thin slashes that laced their way up her arm. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he asked.

“So you could recommend psychiatric help for me, too? Ship me off to a mental hospital on the other side of the country?”

“Jack, you told me Raven was in danger of hurting himself. I had a professional obligation to order a psych evaluation, and after spending seventy-two hours with the boy, Dr. Grimaldi thought it would be best to send Raven to a place where he could process his grief. The Seven Brothers Academy isn’t a mental hospital. It’s a boarding school for boys who’ve experienced trauma. Raven has had round-the-clock doctors at his disposal, and some of the best educators in the country.”

“I guess I should thank you then,” Jack said bitterly. “Except Raven’s going to rot in that place until he’s eighteen, and then he’ll never come back here, since his father threw him away so easil—”

“You don’t know?” Medina’s eyes narrowed, and Jack’s heart stuttered like the wings of a dying butterfly. “Raven’s been given a clean bill of health from the Seven Brothers Academy. As of three days ago, he was cleared to come home.”

“He… What?” Her eyelids fluttered closed, and behind them she could see soft hands and ebony curls. Bright eyes. “Raven’s coming home?”

“His flight gets in this afternoon. He was supposed to arrive last night, but his original flight was canceled, thank God. If he’d arrived when he was scheduled to, he might’ve been the one to find his stepmother. How terrible would that have been, after finding his mom the way he did? Lying in the snow…” The detective kept talking, but Jack didn’t hear a word. The phrase his flight gets in this afternoon kept trickling through her mind. It should’ve brought her joy. Should’ve made her hands tremble in anticipation, but instead, dread settled into her stomach, heavy as a rock.

“Does Belle know he’s on his way home? Did she know he was coming home?”