Over the next few days, painful memories began bubbling to the surface, and each bubble contained its own discrete nightmare. In one of the first, she saw herself as a young girl, peering into her mother’s bathroom. Her father sat on the edge of the bathtub, talking to his wife. All Katy could see was her father’s broad back. He had never sat in there like that—in fact, Brody Royal hardly spoke to his wife at all. But on that day, he’d spoken steadily, and in such a low, cruel voice that Katy had quickly retreated. An hour later, her father called an ambulance and told them his drunken wife had drowned in the bathtub. Ever since remembering this, Katy been unable to get into the bathtub.

“You want to kill me,” she said to her husband, voicing her terror for the first time. “Don’t you?”

Randall stopped drying himself and looked at her mirror, his actor’s mask almost making him appear human. But he must have sensed her state of mind, because suddenly his mask fell away. Forty years of unalloyed hatred blazed out of his eyes like deadly radiation.

“Go on,” she goaded, knowing she would pay for her defiance. “Admit it. You want to kill me.”

“I ought to,” he said. “I’ve been chained to your pathetic ass for forty years, and you’ve been trying to kill yourself the whole time. You nearly drank yourself to death in the seventies. You all but blew your heart out with coke in the eighties, and you’ve been eating tranqs and happy pills ever since. You were hardly alive that whole time. What was the point?”

“You tell me,” Katy said quietly. “Why didn’t you just put me out of my misery?” Like Daddy did Mama, she thought.

Randall shook his head with exasperation, but he didn’t answer.

“I know you’ve wanted to,” Katy went on, trying to push him to—to what? “I can see it in your eyes. Right now. You’d like to choke the life out of me, watch my face turn blue. You almost did it a couple of times. That night at Gulf Shores. And the time in Las Vegas, after the dog show.”

Randall’s face darkened. “Don’t even mention your little rat dogs. Brody should have left you in the nuthouse over in Texas.”

She shuddered, a physical echo of her year locked inside the Borgen Institute.

“Tell me, Randall,” she said in a voice she barely recognized. “Please. Why am I still here?”

He stepped closer, staring down like a hunter about to finish a wounded animal. Her brain told her to run, but she remained on her stool. If he killed her … what did it matter?

“You really want to know?” he asked, and she shivered at the coldness in his voice. “I’ll tell you. You know that river land you own?”

“What about it?”