He first came into Frankie’s life a year ago because of his mother. Alana Newman came to Frankie after her son had been arrested for rape, and she offered a lot of money for her to talk to him. Her instinct, seeing that many zeroes on a check, was to say no. She wasn’t a hired gun. But Alana was as smooth as her son. She told a good story, and she cried the right amount of tears. She didn’t claim that Darren was guiltless in his life, but she claimed that he was a victim of his past. He’d been abused in school. He’d never learned how to respect women. He’d made mistakes, but he wasn’t a rapist. The case was a he-said, she-said between her son and an SF State senior he’d met at a party. The prosecutors were trying to make an example of him.

If Frankie could have gone back in time, she would have torn the check in half. Instead, she agreed to meet Darren. To talk. To judge him for herself, face-to-face. That was her mistake. She had enough arrogance as a therapist to believe that no man could manipulate her, but she hadn’t counted on a man like Darren Newman.

He knew that the best lies started with the truth. The first story he told her was a true story from his childhood. He’d spent his first eighteen years in Wisconsin, in a small town outside Green Bay. At age seven, he’d built a snow fort in his front yard during a Thanksgiving Day blizzard. He’d burrowed into its tunnels and stayed there while the family was inside, but as the snow continued to fall, the fort collapsed on top of him.

It was half an hour before anyone noticed. He spent that time trapped in a cave of white, slowly suffocating, his air leaching away breath by breath. He couldn’t move or free himself. All he could do was stare at the white snow from inside his tomb. By the time they dug him out, he was unconscious, and the doctors said another five minutes would have killed him.

He still had vivid flashbacks of that near-death experience, he told her. He didn’t cry about it, though. He softened his voice and stared into space, as if the trapped child were still inside the man. He looked at her with those magnetic eyes, which said, I need you to help me.

She was hooked.

It was also the last true story Darren told her.