Floor by floor, people stepped off, the crowd thinning until after the fifteenth floor only she and Dovey remained. And when the doors closed, Dovey turned toward her and stared, no words, no sound, just like he had done before. Lila wanted to say something, but her words died at the back of her throat. Her breath quickened, and her palms began to sweat.

She started counting, the numbers ticking down as the elevator crept upward. Ten, nine, eight, seven…The elevator crawled so slowly that Lila had to slow her counting. Six…five…four…three…two…

A ding announced their arrival on the twentieth floor. One.

Lila’s heart thumped inside of her chest hard enough that Dovey should have been able to sense it. Her fingers still clutched the letter from the Board of Law Examiners, now damp from the sweat of her fists. She should confront him. This was her chance, but she wasn’t ready. She hadn’t prepared for this.

After the doors opened, he continued to stare at her, making no move to exit the elevator, and when she glanced up at him, he wore the smile of a man on the verge of saying, Checkmate. Lila stepped past him to exit the elevator, and as she did, he murmured, “You don’t belong here.”

Lila pretended that she hadn’t heard him, both furious and sickened by her cowardice—and counting her steps in measures of ten.

By the time she got to her office, Lila was so mad that she could barely think. She wanted to punch something, but she also wanted to curl up on her chair and cry. She would allow neither. The heat in her chest reminded her of that rage she felt when she’d first drawn a razor blade across her arm. Stop it! Lila grabbed her desk and squeezed her anger out through her fingers. You’re not that girl anymore.

As her anger slowly eased, Lila saw Sadie Vauk’s file lying on the desk in front of her. She and Andi were scheduled to meet with Sadie that morning. She picked it up and opened it to the pictures: Sadie after they’d pulled her from the river, weak and confused, Sadie showing the cuts and bruises she got as she clung to the rocks, Gavin Spencer at the lineup, the beauty salon where he’d kidnapped her, his house where they were sure he’d taken her. With each new image, the thought of Frank Dovey faded further into the distance until it was little more than a dust mote floating on the breeze.

Her job—her calling—was to put monsters like Gavin Spencer in prison. If she let Frank Dovey sidetrack her from that mission, she would become someone small, like him, focused on her career and not on her job.

It would take time for Dovey to drive her out, and she vowed to use that time to make a difference. When the time came for her to leave, she would walk out with her head held high.

* * *