“What has Ethan told you?” he says. “About my sister?”

Nothing, I want to say. Nothing I know to be true. She doesn’t, after all, have fierce red hair or love science. She didn’t go to college in New Jersey. She may very well not know how to swim across a pool. I know now why he told us all those things—why he made up such an elaborate backstory. It was so, on the off chance the wrong person ever approached Bailey, if the wrong person ever suspected Bailey of being who she actually was, she’d be able to look that person in the eye and honestly deny it. My mother is a redheaded swimmer. My mother is nothing like the person you think I belong to.

I meet Charlie’s eyes, answer honestly. “He hasn’t told me much. But he once told me how much I would have liked her,” I say. “He told me we would have liked each other.”

Charlie nods, but he stays quiet. And I can feel all the questions he has about my life with Owen, all the questions about Bailey: about who she is now and what she likes now and how she may still be a little like his lost sister, who he clearly loved. But he can’t ask any of those questions, not without fielding questions of his own, questions for which he doesn’t want to provide answers.

“Look,” he says, “if you want someone to tell you that there’s enough goodwill because of Kristin that my father can get over what happened between him and Ethan, that they can reach some kind of truth, they can’t. He won’t. It doesn’t work like that. My father isn’t over it.”

“I know that too,” I say.

And I do know that. But I’m banking on the fact that Charlie wants to help me anyway. Or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We’d be having a different conversation—a conversation neither of us wants to have about what Owen has done to this family. And to me. We’d be having a conversation that would break my heart wide open.

He looks at me more gently. “Did I scare you earlier?” he says.

“I should be asking you that.”

“I didn’t mean to come at you the way I did. It was just that you surprised the hell out of me,” he says. “You wouldn’t believe how many people come here, stirring up trouble for my father. All these crime junkies who saw the trial coverage on Court TV, who think they know my father, who want autographs. Even all these years later. I think we’re on some criminal enterprise tour of Austin. Us and the Newton Gang…”

“That sounds awful,” I say.

“It is,” he says. “It’s all awful.”