Tim went quiet. I wasn’t going to bring it up, but the past few days had left me feeling brittle. The confidence I’d had in my recovery was cracking at the seams.

Tim said, “I may have, yeah.”

“You told him you think I’m ready to go back to work.”

“Right.”

“Do you still?”

Tim’s dark eyebrows, his most notable feature, came together. “What I think is that this case is too personal for you. If there’s any chance Felicia and Crissy are mixed up in Brett’s death, you’ve got to defer to Harmison. You’re in no position to conduct an objective investigation, not even an unofficial one.”

“I disagree. I’m perfectly positioned to get this solved. There’s a lot about the Merchants and the Skiltons you don’t know—that nobody knows but me. We’re not your average family.”

“Does that even exist? I was raised by two moms. I’ve got a sister and two stepbrothers, one of them adopted from Haiti, and more cousins than I can count. I kissed one of them by accident once.” His cheeks flushed. “There were so many around town I didn’t even know we were related.”

“But there was love there. Loyalty. Trust.”

“Of course,” he said. “Was it not like that for you?”

“In my house, definitely. But you heard Crissy. Things were different for her.”

The car windows were fogging up. I wiped a circle with the side of my fist. In my mind’s eye, I saw my ten-year-old self burst from the deep green shade of the trees around Raleigh Field and cross the grass. It was hot as a furnace that day, the sun a searing blanket on my back and my skin shrink-wrapped to my bones. I remember realizing, with a pang of regret, that I was sunburned. I knew I’d get a lecture from my dad, whom I had to thank for my English complexion, but in the moment there was no reversing the damage, and I had a job to do. So I put my head down, looked for clues, and ignored the impression that my ears were being singed to black.

I only felt his eyes on me when I reached the parking lot. After finding the cat, we’d decided to go our separate ways: I would search the field, while Abe explored the woods. But he wasn’t doing that at all. I sensed his eyes mapping my movements as if through a rifle scope. I spun around, and my gaze raked the distant forest. I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was there.

“Family,” I said again, my voice crisp. “I wonder what it’s like to have one you really know. This whole thing has made me realize I don’t know the Skiltons at all—and that makes me wonder how well I know myself. All that stuff about nature versus nurture? You can’t tell me genes don’t play a big part in who we become. Are killers born, or are they made? It has to be both. That means it’s in your blood.”