“What have you done, Nicky?” Vero whispers to me. “Who else do you have to fear?”

*   *   *

I JERK AWAKE with a gasp. My head is on fire; my entire body aches. For a second, instinctively, reflexively, I lock down each muscle. Willing myself not to move. Old habits, back from the days when you never knew who else might be present. Waiting to hurt you next.

A first careful inhale. Followed by a long, slow exhale. I listen, registering voices, coming through the wall, from the room next door. I search closer, for the sound of another person’s presence nearby. Only when I’m absolutely, completely convinced that I’m alone do I finally open my eyes, allow my muscles to relax.

The room is dark. I can see a thin streak of light on the far wall, coming from the cracked doorway between the two hotel rooms. Bits and pieces return to me. My current hideaway in the form of a nondescript New Hampshire hotel room. The disastrous meeting with Marlene Bilek, who turned out to not be my mom, because of course, my real mom died of an overdose years ago, before I even escaped from the dollhouse. Someone I once looked up to, only to forget again, because what was the point? I was never the princess with a magical queen. My entire life, I’ve only ever been in the service of an evil witch.

My eyes burn. Stupid tears, I think as I roll over, eye the second bed. It’s empty, as I’d suspected. Tessa must be in the adjacent room, talking to Wyatt.

They are probably rehashing the case. Trying to understand why I went to the trouble to track down Marlene Bilek, when she isn’t my mother. Why I cling to a quilt handcrafted by a woman I’d never met.

How I ended up with Vero’s fingerprints in my Audi.

I don’t know the answer to the last question. It confuses me as much as it does them. As for the first two issues . . . I guess I was just trying to keep Vero alive, shore up her memory. Our imaginary visits weren’t enough to ease my pain, so I went to the next step of establishing a tangible connection in the form of her mother.

Maybe, if I could make Vero real enough, her family real enough, then she wouldn’t be gone and I wouldn’t have to feel so guilty.

Because twenty-two years later, I still haven’t figured out the business of living. I survive, I suppose. I exist. I even got married and moved all around the country. But was that truly living or just another form of running? All those nights I woke up screaming. All those memories I suppressed time and time again, until my mind was a mixed-up mess way before the concussions began.

I got out of the dollhouse but never escaped the past. The weight of my own guilt, a skill set I never learned? I don’t know. I feel like I want to be something more. I want to do something more. But I don’t know how to get there.

I could run again, I contemplate now, curled up on the hotel room bed. Pick out a new state, new town, new identity. It’s what I’ve done before. Especially the first two years after my escape. Dragging Thomas from place to place, name to name, often on a weekly basis. Less a strategic bid for freedom than a clear case of hysteria. Thomas had begged me to slow down. At least try out a new location before casting it into the wind. At least pick one name, one identity, so we had some shot at building a normal life.

Under his guidance, we’d done one last professional do-over, paying good money for proper IDs, vetted history. We’d become Thomas and Nicole Frank, identities he swore would keep us safe. And yet still, every two years I’d had to move again. Because the weight of November still became too much.

Maybe I can take up drinking seriously this time, I ponder now. Brain trauma be damned. I’ll throw back scotch, burn out these terrible memories once and for all. I’ll tell myself I’m free and happy and independent. Fuck Thomas; fuck Vero. I will escape both of them. I will be a woman who has it all.

A woman who is no one at all.

Except that’s not completely true, I find myself thinking. More shadows, shifting and lurching in the back of my head. The taste of dirt. The feel of earth giving way beneath my fingertips. And that moment, that one savage moment when I realized I had done it. I was out; I was alive. I was free of the dollhouse.

That moment, right before . . .

Smoke. Heat. My house burning down in New Hampshire. Why did Thomas torch it? His workshop maybe, but our entire house? Why the need to burn it to the ground?

How did Thomas become so good with fire?

Vero, laughing in the back of my mind. “Is it your past you’re trying to escape, or the man you married?”

I rein it all in. Force my eyes to focus on the here and now. The darkened hotel room. The empty bed beside me. I don’t want to feel so helpless anymore. Or lost or confused or overwhelmed.

This is it. The moment of truth.

I can spend the rest of my life being a dead woman’s roommate or a missing man’s wife.

Then, in the next heartbeat.

No. I’m more than either of those two things. I’m the one who wanted to move to New Hampshire, even when Thomas tried to convince me otherwise. I’m the one who hired a private investigator, even though Thomas tried to tell me to let it be.

I’m a woman twice returned from the dead.

And I’m not finished yet.

Chapter 32

WHILE WYATT WORKED with Kevin on the fingerprint riddle, Tessa got on the phone with D. D. Warren.

The Boston detective was her usual charming self. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“My watch says midnight.”

“I haven’t even agreed to work for your high-and-mighty investigative firm yet—”

“But you did agree to a freelance assignment.”

“I already achieved the high score on Angry Birds.”

“You, an angry bird? Who would’ve thought?”

“Shut up,” D.D. said.

Which made Tessa smile. Because as interactions with the temperamental detective went, this was par for the course, and so far, the most normal conversation Tessa had had all night.

“I’m sorry to call so late,” Tessa acknowledged. “But if memory holds, you’re one of those round-the-clock workers. As in you’ll sleep when you retire. Or the day you drop dead.”

“Same diff,” D.D. replied.

“Perfect, because this case feels like it’s spiraling out of control and we definitely could use some answers sooner versus later.”

Wyatt had wrapped up his call. Tessa waved him over to join, putting her phone on speaker. Wyatt and D.D. had worked together on the Denbe case, so no introductions were required.

“How’s your arm?” Wyatt asked.

“Getting there.”

“Got a date for the fitness-for-duty test?” he asked.

“Getting there,” D.D. said, and this time her voice indicated end of discussion. “So the Veronica Sellers case. According to the always-in-the-know-and-never-wrong nightly news, you found the missing girl. Albeit thirty years late.”

“Um . . . we’re not so sure about that,” Tessa said.

A moment of silence. Then: “Well, I’ll be damned. Guess I’m happy I took your call after all.”

Wyatt explained about the fingerprint confusion, filling in now: “Kevin just examined the latex gloves using a magnifying glass, and sure enough, there appear to be ridge patterns at the end of each finger. As in, Thomas Frank somehow fashioned a pair of fingerprint gloves, designed to leave Veronica Sellers’s prints all over his wife’s car.”

“He wanted his wife identified as a missing girl from a thirty-year-old cold case?” D.D. asked in confusion. “But why?”

“That’s the million-dollar question. Got any ideas?”

“I’ve been reviewing the whole sorry case file,” D.D. said. “Can I just say, when you asked me to look into all the missing-kid and runaway-youth cases from thirty years ago in New England . . . What a shit assignment.”