Lila reached out, wrapped her fingers around Sadie’s hand, and gave a light squeeze, holding the connection long enough to let Sadie know that she meant it when she replied, “I understand.”

Lila left Sadie in the bailiff station and walked to court, where Dovey once again sat in the back pew. She counted her steps to counsel table, the silent tick of numbers easing the anxious swell that bloomed in her chest. This case had her walking on the edge of a blade.

Lila didn’t look at Spencer when they brought him in, but after he was seated next to his attorney, she couldn’t stop her head from turning. The man was wholly unremarkable, a guy who could blend into any backdrop, disappear in a crowd with the ease of a copperhead in a bed of dead leaves. He was the kind of guy that Lila would never have noticed or remembered. But isn’t it the copperhead you don’t see that bites you?

Then Spencer glanced at her, and Lila could remember his voice, how his name fell heavy and wet from his lips. A chill touched her lungs and began to spread through her chest like frost. The panic had returned.

Judge Anderson opened the hearing by addressing Spencer’s attorney, which gave Lila a moment to thaw. She ran through her script in her head, paying enough attention to what Mr. Reecey was saying to know which of her practiced responses would fit. When the time came, she stood, humming softly to herself to prime her vocal cords. She swallowed, and then spoke in a voice much softer than she had intended. “Defendant’s motion is boilerplate, Your Honor.”

She cleared her throat and continued, yet the tremble behind her words made her sound like a child caught misbehaving. She was glad that Sadie couldn’t hear the shake in her voice. Had Dovey noticed? Had Andi? If she had, she didn’t show it. Lila finished her points and returned to her seat, relieved to have kept the panic at bay behind its paper-thin veil.

At the end of the hearing, when she vacated the table to make room for the next prosecutor, she knew she would pass within a few feet of Gavin Spencer. He turned his face up to watch her leave, and she willed herself to look at him, hold the focus of his stare. She studied him with the eye of a poker player. He turned her stomach, but she wanted to take in all that she could in that brief moment. She wanted to shake something loose, some new crumb. What was it about this man that turned the air around her so thin?

Next, Lila passed Dovey, who looked at her with an expression of mock indifference, but Lila could see calculations moving behind his eyes. He had come there to confirm that she was weak, and she may have given him what he wanted.

As she rode the elevator back up to her office, she continued to think about Gavin, and an idea occurred to her. If his lisp could trigger a bad memory, whisking her back to those stolen hours, might not a different trigger unlock a more helpful memory?