“We don’t know,” Niki said. But that wasn’t true—Niki did know. Unfortunately, the gap between knowing a thing and proving a thing could be as wide as a canyon.

Putting Gavin Spencer at a party with Eleanora Abrams the week she was murdered didn’t put him in the club. The Phantom of the Opera wasn’t a pirate, and nothing they’d found in their search of Gavin’s house hinted at a connection. Even with the homecoming story and the photo, Niki was a hundred miles away from probable cause, and even further away from proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But in her heart, she had no doubt—she knew.

“Tell me everything you know about Gavin Spencer.”

Chapter 27

Chapter 27

Dr. Roberts worked at the Hennepin County Medical Center, but also had an office in a nearby high-rise built of steel and blue glass, a building Lila used to call the Aquarium. Her mother had driven Lila there for her visits with Dr. Roberts back in that summer when Lila’s gloom had sent her to the hospital.

Gloom—that’s the word her mother, Charlotte, used when talking about Lila’s downfall. “You seem so gloomy,” Charlotte had said. “You need to get some fresh air. Call Sylvie. Maybe catch a movie. That’ll cheer you up.” But Lila could not call Sylvie. They were no longer friends, and explaining why they weren’t friends would have taken more energy than Lila cared to muster. Instead, Lila chose to resolve her gloom with a handful of her mother’s Ambien.

Even after the suicide attempt, Charlotte used words like gloom and doldrums to talk about Lila’s circumstances, avoiding any true conversation. As for the suicide attempt itself, her mother called that the incident, as though not calling it what it was raised doubt as to whether it happened at all. It was the incident that happened back when Lila was in the doldrums.

Lila paused outside of Dr. Roberts’s office, the harsh florescent light in the corridor behind her casting her shadow against the door, a phantom inviting her back into the room where she had shed so many tears. In those months with Dr. Roberts, she had loved him and hated him. He’d guided her through a dark place, opening wounds that she refused to acknowledge. And when she lashed out, he had let her. All of those old feelings—emotions she thought she’d tamped down long ago—found new life and now itched beneath her skin.

And as he had done all those years ago, Dr. Roberts greeted Lila with the smile of an old friend. He hadn’t changed much since she had last seen him. A smallish man with a balding head and thin wire glasses, he liked to walk around his office in his socks, a practice that Lila thought was meant to ease her anxiety—and it had.