But Verlaine remained the most likely candidate. Perhaps there were others to investigate—that school counselor, for one, Ms. Walsh; she seemed to take an interest in Nadia—but Verlaine Laughton was the correct place to begin.

Satisfied, Elizabeth dipped her hands into the ocean and drank. Even a mouthful of seawater could cause vomiting and hallucinations in most people. She was past all that now. It could not even make her thirstier than she already was, always was. All she needed to do was to see if she could start to taste the blood.

“You should’ve had your friends stay for dinner,” Dad said as he went into the kitchen. “We could have celebrated.”

“If you’d called ahead to tell me you won, maybe I would’ve asked them.” Nadia wasn’t being entirely honest about that, she knew. Today had been intense for all of them; she figured Mateo and Verlaine probably needed to decompress tonight as much as she did. Her nerves remained on edge. But still—she could imagine a day when they would all hang out at her place, and her father would maybe be in “kind of cool Dad” mode instead of “annoying oversensitive Dad” mode. It could be … sort of fun. She could see them here. Especially Mateo. Her lips curled into a soft smile as she remembered how friendly and gentle he’d been with Cole, down there on the floor like playing with LEGOs was still his favorite thing to do.

If only they could get out from under Elizabeth’s influence—if only she could be sure that Mateo could be hers to keep, that there was no chance of having him stolen away—

The clanging of a pan on the stove jolted her back to the here and now. “Hey. What are you doing?”

“Making us some spaghetti.” Dad had taken out a glass jar of some sauce from the store. “The pasta—that’s going to be on this shelf, right? Yes. Huh, no spaghetti, but we have these tube things, and that works just the same.”

“Dad. I’ll make dinner.”

“Don’t be silly.” He didn’t even slow down, like he wasn’t listening to her at all. “I’ve got this. How hard can it be?”

“That stuff in the jar is from, like, a factory. I can make it from scratch in half an hour, and it’ll be ten times better.”

“Yeah, I know, but this is all right, isn’t it? You’ve eaten it before. Cole even likes it; he put it in the shopping cart himself.”

“That’s not the point.” Why was he being so annoying? Nadia wanted him out of her kitchen, where he was going to make a mess, plus gross pasta sauce. She tried the buttering-up approach. “You won your big hearing today. So you should take the night off, right? Let us treat you.”

“The treat for me is fixing dinner for my family.” Dad was starting to look about as ticked off as she felt. “Don’t you have some homework to do? You never seem to have any homework.”