“Lexie Pine.” My heart sank to hear her name again. “What did Ansel—Adam tell you?” Now he was the one looking anxious, trying to find judgment in my eyes. I had none for him, though. All I had was love and waiting.

“Just that name,” I said. “His son is missing, too. He and his wife aren’t doing well. She’s medicating heavily, and she lost it. He gave us the name and threw us out.”

Trey stood up and walked away, and I could see fury in his back and spine. “So Lexie Pine took Robert? Lexie Pine was the woman you saw outside our window?”

“No,” I said. “We believe the old woman is her mother. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

He scrubbed at his face with both hands, and I saw that his eyes were leaking. The knowledge that Robert was in the hands of a crazy, vicious woman who had already harmed one child and that it was connected to his own past, it had wrecked him.

“I should have believed you when you first said there was a witch in our yard. I should have gone out and found her, held her, had her arrested.”

“Stop it,” I said.

He didn’t. “And it’s my history. Mine and Spencer’s, and Ansel’s, too, that caused all this.”

“You can tell me.” I went to him and took his hands, squeezing hard.

“It’s not a good story. I don’t look good in it. But it’s not—” He squeezed my hands back, more tears leaking. “I didn’t do anything that would justify her taking Robert.”

“Nothing on earth justifies that,” I said. Robert had yet to take a step or speak a word. “I blame her. Not you. But I have to understand how this began. So we can end it. You have to tell me. You have to tell me all of it.”

He closed his eyes. He swallowed. And he did.

16

Before I met Kelly Wilkerson, What did you do? was such an angry question that the dear, familiar shape of my husband twisted into a monster when I tried to look at him through the lens of it. I’d had crazy ideas about how to know if his answer was the truth.