It had happened once before, the panic attack, three summers ago when Lila drove to Iowa to visit her grandmother. She’d passed an old rusted car parked out in the middle of a fallow field, and the sight had nearly squeezed the breath from her chest. Her skin had turned hot and cold at the same time, and her stomach knotted up so tight that she had to pull over to the shoulder.

To anyone else it was just a car in a field, but not to Lila. That was how her attackers had left her, unconscious in the backseat of her own car in the middle of a bean field, her memory stolen by a date-rape drug. It had taken several minutes on that long-ago morning for her eyes to find their focus, the backseat materializing out of nothing, and a few minutes more to understand why her clothing lay at her feet.

After that first panic attack, Lila had made a trip to the university library, where she’d spent hours researching post-traumatic stress triggers: images, sounds, and scents that could transport a person back to the moment of the trauma. She’d understood why the car in Iowa had been such a powerful trigger. But why had Gavin Spencer now sent her spinning? Before she could face Andi, she had to understand.

In her office, she spread his file on her desk, laying his picture on top. His face meant nothing to her. She studied his eyes, the roundness of his chin, his thin lips. He could have been cut from cardboard and construction paper for all that his image affected her. Gavin was a small man accused of a crime that made him even smaller in Lila’s eyes. But her reaction in court had the same debilitating effect on her as what she’d experienced in Iowa. Something in her gut opened the door to the unthinkable: What if they had crossed paths before?

According to the bail study, she and Gavin were the same age. For their freshman years of high school they’d gone to schools geographically close yet miles apart economically—she went to South while he went to Southwest. But halfway through his freshman year, Gavin got shipped to a private school in Indiana. They had never been classmates, and after combing through every word of his file, she found no connection.

She went online and searched for the private school in Indiana and found a link with pictures of his graduation ceremony. She read and then reread the date, the exact night that she had been attacked. Lila scrutinized each picture, looking for Gavin’s face in the crowd. He wasn’t there. Eight pictures in all and Gavin didn’t appear in any of them.