“This is Jude,” she told her father, her voice tight and controlled. “You’ve already met Kira. And the miscreant stealing my bacon is our neighbor Free. They were just on their way out.”

“In terms of grandfather names,” Jude asked the old man, “would you say you’re more of a Granddad or a Papaw?”

The edges of the old man’s lips ticked slightly upward. “You can call me Bales. That’s my name, and if I know my daughter half as well as I think I do, that’ll have to do.” He stood with his hands by his side, nonthreatening, nonconfrontational, but ready to move. “Now, as much as I would like to continue this conversation, son, your mother and I have something to settle.”

“No,” Cady said. “We don’t. What part of no don’t you understand?”

Bales Bennett didn’t bat an eye, didn’t so much as raise his voice. I got the sense that he was the kind of man who never had to. “The part,” he said, “where your issues with me are making you turn your back on a missing child.”

Chapter 5

After that, Cady really did kick us out of the house. I barely noticed. The words missing and child would always take me to places in my memory that I didn’t want to go—the smell of wet dirt, gnawing hunger. I remembered blood beneath my fingernails. In flashes, I could feel myself, crouching, cowering, growling. I could see my tiny body lying in the ravine.

I remembered the exact moment that Silver leapt down beside me.

But whenever I tried to picture what had come before—the weeks in the forest, how I’d survived, the events that had led me out there?

Nothing.

“Some people might say our grandfather is manipulative,” Jude commented, preparing to lather up one of the bloodhounds. “I prefer to think that he is offering our family an opportunity for emotional advancement.”

Jude never left me stranded in the dark for long. With a wink in my direction, he turned his attention to his K9 partner. NATO, a three-year-old bloodhound, was the peacekeeper of our makeshift pack—and every bit the optimist that Jude was.

“Come on, bucko,” Jude crooned, patting the inside of the tub. NATO looked up at Jude adoringly and jumped haplessly in.

“Poor sap,” Free commented. “Doesn’t matter how
many times we play this game, he never sees the betrayal coming.”

“I am going to assume,” Jude replied austerely as he turned on the hose, “that you are talking about the dog.”

It was another few seconds before NATO realized, belatedly, that he was being bathed. He bayed mournfully.

“Whoever could have seen this coming?” Free asked the dog. “In related news, someone needs to help me with Her Ladyship.”