“How do you do it?” I asked Mac, rushing the question, the words piling on top of each other like trucks on the freeway. “How do you go out there, again and again, knowing what you’re going to find?”

“I tell myself that I don’t find bodies,” Mac replied evenly. “I find answers. I find lost ones, and I bring them home.”

He held out the pendant he’d removed from around his neck. I realized, belatedly, that he wanted me to take it. As my fingers latched around the gift, my chest loosened enough to stop fighting every breath.

I turned the medallion over to get a better look at it.

“My personal patron saint,” Mac offered. “The Wades—lovely bunch that we are—happen to be the world’s worst Catholics. You’re looking at the patron saint of lost causes.”

My fingers tightened around the medallion. Saint Jude. A breath caught in my throat, and slowly, I began to understand why Cady hadn’t been glad to see Mac, why I was okay sitting next to a complete stranger, why Saskia had let him pet her. Mackinnon Wade was calm and collected and centered—and familiar.

Ash isn’t Jude’s father. Before I could say anything out loud, Cady came back to retrieve me and took us home.

Chapter 38

When I was younger, I had trouble closing my eyes. I needed to be able to see things coming. Changes to routine, sudden movements, unfamiliar environments, unfamiliar people—those sent me straight to high alert.

Surprises were indistinguishable from attacks.

Jude had made it his mission in life to run interference on my behalf. Not this time. I felt motion sick, though I knew the gut-rending nausea had nothing to do with the way Cady was driving. Jude can’t run interference, because he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know that Mac is his father. He doesn’t know, and I do.

As a child, I’d been taught by specialist after specialist to recognize, regulate, and appropriately express my emotions. How do you feel? The question was a thorn, wedged into my flesh. How do I feel? I thought angrily.

I felt like I’d seen a mass grave. I felt complicit in the way that Bella Anthony’s story had ended. I felt like I had no right to have been the one that Mac told about Saint Jude.

“Out.” Cady didn’t bother to issue separate orders to the dogs and the three of us when we arrived back at the house. She didn’t say a word to Free, Jude, and me about the way we’d moseyed right into a crime scene. Part of me wanted her to read us the riot act. At least that would have been predictable.

“Go on,” Cady said once we were inside. “Pack your bags. We leave in the morning.”