“He was nineteen when the rape allegation was made, a sophomore in college. Said it was a misunderstanding and the girl was drunk. I can’t see how, but his parents made it go away. I’ll bet it cost them plenty.”

“How old was the girl?”

“Sixteen.”

“And it went away? Let’s interview him this week. Napa’s really nice this time of year.”

He smiles. “Agreed.”

“Whether or not Drew’s significant here, I think Cameron was complicit somehow. It’s never as black and white as you think in these cases. Sometimes victims seek out their abusers just as intensely as they’re pursued.”

“What are you saying?”

I plunge ahead and tell him about the window in Cameron’s room, and how it’s possible she was groomed and manipulated by this predator, whoever he was. That he may have preyed on her insecurity and need. “The stickiest sorts of violence are often incredibly intimate, Will. They require trust. They take time.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “If Cameron left the property voluntarily, she deliberately avoided the security camera. Why? Her parents were obviously going to figure out she was gone soon enough.”

“You’re assuming she meant to stay gone. What if she was just planning to sneak out for a few hours, but then the situation flipped? It’s easy enough to avoid the cameras if she went through the woods to the coast road. All she had to do was disable the alarm. The remote was right there in her nightstand. She didn’t even have to work at it.”

“Are you saying this was a tryst? Like a date?”

“Maybe not. She could have only been seeking attention.”

“From someone who could hurt her? Don’t you think she’d know better than that?”

“No,” I say. “She wouldn’t.” I can’t expect him to be as tuned in to Cameron’s vulnerabilities as I am. He’s never been a throwaway kid. Never experienced the world in a woman’s body, or a girl’s. Never had a reason to confuse love with suffering. I’ve sensed that confusion almost electrically since the first moment I saw Cameron’s missing poster, the woundedness in her eyes. “Maybe she never had healthy radar to begin with.”

Will nods in a halfhearted way, and then falls silent. After a while he says, “What did you think of Emily?”

“I don’t know. I want her to be stronger, I guess.”

“She might be doing the best she can.”

His words knock and spark, like flint on stone. Of course he’s right. People almost always do the best they can. Sometimes it’s enough, but more often it isn’t.

“If Emily had had the guts to leave Troy the first time he cheated on her, that might have changed everything,” I say.

“Could be. We’ll never know now.”