The edges of Bales’s mouth crept upward. Cady’s did the same. She didn’t wait for a verbal response, and her father didn’t offer one as she turned and walked back toward the house.

“You got something to add?” Bales asked me when he noticed me staring at him.

I stuffed my hands into my pockets. “Not a thing.”

He’d spent half a lifetime here, with Ness. Whatever the last months of his life held for her, it wasn’t going to be pretty. He could come home with us, but as I took in the overwhelming view of the mountain and breathed in the summer air, I wasn’t sure that he would.

“There’s an election coming up,” Bales said after a long moment. “For sheriff.”

I thought of Gabriel, of the way his stepfather had approached Bella’s case, of the thing’s he’d said to me.

“You have a candidate in mind?” I asked Bales.

“One of the FBI agents has family here. Seems to me he’s a bit burned out on the bureau.”

I felt the edges of my lips curve slightly upward. A gentle wind lifted my hair off my shoulders. For several minutes, Bales and I stood there in silence, and then he reached into his back pocket and pulled something out.

A photograph, folded and creased.

“I heard what you said to Ness yesterday—about Ash.” Bales unfolded the picture. He stared at it for a moment, then held it out to me. “Figured you were bluffing.”

I took the picture from him and recognized it as the one Ness had left for us the day before—Cady and Mac and Ash, in their early twenties.

“Funny thing,” Bales continued. “Ash did have a scar that ran from his jaw to his chin—but he didn’t get it until after the three of them started working hand in hand with the military.”

I didn’t follow what the implication of that statement was until I looked down at the photograph in my hand. Cady. Mac. Ash. Looking at it now, I could hear every confession that had crossed Cady’s lips the day before. I could see John Ashby reaching the extraction point and turning back.

What I couldn’t see was a scar in the photograph. No white line slashed across Ash’s jaw.

That’s not possible.

“How did you know?” Bales asked me. “About the scar?”

Suddenly, I was back in the forest, caught in a trap. Girl sees Man. Man helps her. Man always helps her—

In the span between one breath and the next, the memory was gone, and no matter how hard I fought to get it back, I saw nothing but the forest, the wolf, the dark-haired woman’s body on the kitchen floor.

I was bluffing, I thought, my head spinning. I was just trying to distract Ness. I made it up.