Mom laughed. “Will do. Mary Jo at the salon—she’s the one who trims your father—has a brother who’s with the police. He hears things at the station. And you know how people talk.”

“That I do.” When I was a kid, the names on the lips of those gossipmongers often belonged to members of my own family. Bones. I took another sip of wine. Truth be told, I was indebted to this news, which would be a welcome distraction tonight. My encounter with Tim and my psych exam still loomed in my mind. If I could push them aside, I might even manage a few solid hours of sleep.

“Before I go,” my mother said, “I’ve been meaning to ask. How are things going with your therapist?”

* * *

McIntyre came home just before midnight, not long after I finished the dishes, took Whiskey out to pee, and put myself to bed. When I heard her bolt the door and shuffle off to her room, I pretended to be asleep. There was a disturbance in my bowels that had nothing to do with my pathetic supper or too much red wine, and I wanted to be alone with it. Figure out what it meant.

I used to sleep like a worn-out toddler, sprawled on my stomach and dead to the world. Lately, especially since ditching the pills Carson had prescribed to “nudge me into dreamland,” I spend most nights like this one: coffin-stiff and staring at the ceiling. When Mac closed the door to her bedroom, my eyes snapped back open, and I watched the firelight turn specks of dust into spiders and sheetrock seams into canyons. Its trickery was a good metaphor for how I’d felt earlier when I told Mom the same thing I told Sam. I’m good as new. I’ll be reinstated soon.

The claim wasn’t entirely false. Aside from that unnerving moment with my sensei, I felt markedly better. I’d assured Sam the flashbacks I experienced on Tern Island had disappeared once I got back to the mainland, and they had. I’d left the panic attacks behind, too. I still had visions of Bram, but they felt more like grit the wind blew in my eye than a murderous fiend breathing down my neck. Again and again I forced myself into the open, unprotected, and found I could handle it. Take that, Carson Gates.

And yet, I knew I couldn’t completely abolish my PTSD without facing the man who caused it. Gil Gasko, my counselor, said I had to accept the fact that my abductor was still free and learn not to live in fear. Fat chance. Blake Bram was the reason I’d been so detached during my game of Bullshit with Mac, my karate class with Sam, and everything in between. Bram had held me captive in a basement in New York’s East Village for eight days before shooting the cop who’d stumbled onto his chamber of horrors and seized his chance to escape. He may have left me behind, but he didn’t let me go.