“Tell me about the male spirit who came forward.”

“Excuse me?”

Sylvie abruptly grabs a marker off the table, scrawls a message on her right arm: You take the red pill.

Unsettled, I say, “I have no idea what—”

She continues to write: You stay in wonderland.

“I suggest you—”

. . . and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Sylvie’s pupils are so enormous, they eclipse the gray of her iris. A shiver spins down my spine. Keeping my voice steady, I say, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

SIX

Sylvie

I don’t know what the message I wrote means. Maybe it’s nonsense. But I do know that there’s a whiff of desperation to Thomas. Can it help me? “You’ve shared your intentions to expose me. So why are you here now?”

“To offer you an opportunity.”

“What opportunity?”

“To tell your side of the story.”

I sit back, the picture of calm, while inside I scramble. All those years of revolving therapists, Lucas’s unwavering belief, my burgeoning following and many successes, yet five minutes with this guy and I’m a hamster trying to outrun my wheel. I tamp down fear, focus. “Why not interview all the people I’ve helped?”

“I talked to a lot of them. But they’re believers.”

I manage a smile and say, “They wouldn’t be if I’d failed them.”

“We’ve already established how you succeed.”

Draping an arm around Moose, I ask him, “Exactly what do you want to know, Doubting Thomas?”

He opens a notepad, scans it. “I have very little background on you. I’d like you to fill in the missing pieces. You were adopted when you were about six, raised in High River, Oregon, by orchardists. Your high school pal, Holly McConnell, said your biological parents, Becky and Seth Peters, died in a plane crash?”

“That’s right.”

He looks up from the page. “It is? There’s no record of that crash.”

Moose is solid beneath my arm, but the room still slips sideways for a second. He’s lying to throw me off. “Not possible.”

He flips a page. “I spoke with a source at the Oregon Department of Human Services. ODHS oversees the foster care program. She read me your file.”

“Who was your source?”

“A janitor.”

I make a tsk-tsk-tsk sound. “You bribed someone?”

“Do you want to know what I learned?” Thomas asks.

A shadow looms behind me. Every animal senses when they’re about to become prey. Serenely I ask, “What?”

“The only information was your date of birth, birth parents’ names, date of arrival into foster care at age four-and-a-half, your adoptive parents’ names, and the date you went to live with them at a month shy of age six.”

My fingers burrow into Moose’s fur. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Where do I start? There was no information about how you were adopted or details on your parents, the year-and-a-half you spent in foster care, or names of the families who took you in until you were permanently placed. Foster care files are normally filled with information, doctor’s physical exams, dental checks, foster parents’ details, and adoption proceedings. None of that was in your file.”