She didn’t answer.

Sharp turn in the road. Forcing himself to focus.

“John Stephen Purcell,” she stated abruptly. “Police just located the gun used to kill him. I’m told they recovered a single latent print.”

Wyatt couldn’t help himself; he exhaled sharply. “That’s it? A gun? A recently recovered gun? That’s why you’re so distant?”

“You don’t understand. John Stephen Purcell, the man who shot Brian, my husband . . .” Her words were weighted with meaning.

“No, no, no,” he interjected hastily, hands flexing on the wheel. “I understand plenty. And we’re not married, so this doesn’t fall under privilege, and there’s definitely no need to say more. God, Tessa. I thought you were breaking up with me.”

Her turn to frown. “It doesn’t bother you? I’m not just talking about what the police might discover; I’m talking about what I once did.”

He didn’t even have to think about it. “No. You saved Sophie. Tessa, I know who you are. It’s why I love you so much.”

She fell silent again. Not ominous this time. More pondering.

He reached over and took her hand. Heard her own heavy exhale.

“Tessa,” he said, keeping his voice light, “you’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

“What if I don’t have a choice? One fingerprint; that’s all it will take.”

“We’ll figure it out. Two smart people with lots of law enforcement and legal connections. You really think we can’t figure this out?”

“I can’t lose Sophie.”

“I know.”

“One thousand ninety-six days. I told myself it should be enough. It isn’t.”

“I know.”

“Plus, you know, the puppy. I haven’t even met the puppy, and I can’t leave the puppy. Our family is changing; that’s what Sophie said. Our family, my family. I can’t give it up, Wyatt. I can’t lose all of you.”

“Then we’ll figure it out. Together. Because that’s what families do. That’s what we do.”

And suddenly, he got it. How far a man might go for the woman he loved. Or what Thomas Frank had being doing that night, at the scene of his wife’s accident, bearing a glove with fake fingerprints.

A desperate husband, taking one last desperate chance . . .

“Stop!” Tessa shouted. She twisted away, pointing at a spot along the darkened road just as their headlights swept by. “That’s our turn. The road to the dollhouse. Wyatt, we’re here!”

Chapter 39

I CAN’T STAND still anymore. Thomas has the light, but I don’t want to see. I walk away from him. My head hurts. My heart hurts. I put my hands over my ears as if that will help, but it’s no use. I can still hear the screams.

She’s here. I feel her. In the wind, in the vines, in the hardness of the granite foundation. And it makes me shiver. Because I could handle the Vero in my head. The girl who came to visit. The skeleton who stayed for tea. But this Vero . . .

This Vero can hurt me.

“The first five years,” Thomas says from his perch on the granite blocks, “Mother kept things simple. We fostered a couple of girls at a time. Always teenagers; they’d stay a year or two, then leave. Aged out, right? But eventually, Mother became greedier. By then, she’d made some other . . . connections, in the industry. Now no more fostering. She simply brought in young working girls. Got them directly from their pimps. Or, as in your case, purchased them from their own families. No witnesses, no fuss. Everyone’s equally guilty, right?

“I think she also started taking requests. Maybe from several of the clients, or just the wealthiest. I’m not sure. But the girls became younger. For example, she brought you in at ten. But that also made things trickier. Younger girls might seem easier to control, but some of the new charges . . . Their backgrounds were more hard-core. They grew up lying, stealing, hitting, punching. I remember my mom slapping one of the new girls. I’d just walked into the room; I was maybe thirteen, fourteen. I stopped in my tracks, shocked. But then the girl, half the size of my mom . . . she slugged my mother back.

“So my mother upped the ante. She drugged them. Claimed they were addicts anyway. She was simply doing them the favor of avoiding the horrors of detox.”

Thomas paused, smiled faintly. “Funny the way you can know things aren’t right, but still not allow yourself to think of them as being wrong. For example, if I acknowledged my mother was criminal to supply drugs to addicts, then I’d have to also know she was sinful to have a ten-year-old girl shut up in the tower bedroom. Or worse, little Vero, only six years old when she walked through our door.

“I couldn’t . . . She was my mom. And I was just a kid. Like the rest of you, I had no place else to go.”

Thomas leaves his granite block. He moves to standing in front of me, trying to get me to look at him. But I can’t. Too many things are exploding in my head, and the memories are both simpler and more horrible than I want them to be.

The new girls were mean and awful and cruel. Before, we had each kept to ourselves. Now I had to watch my back. It wasn’t enough to hate the men. I had to hide my hairbrush, hoard my dresses, watch my stash of sweets.

The girls were older and wiser. Especially compared to Vero and me. Madame Sade ended up pairing us up in a single room.

Otherwise you’ll be eaten alive, she’d informed us coldly. Seriously. Wise up.

I hated Vero. Whatever mean things the other girls did to me, I turned around and did to her. The trickle-down theory of pain. And maybe that did make us a family. A large dysfunctional family where each member competed to dish out the most hurt.

Vero started telling stories. Whispering them under her breath. Secret realms. Magical queen. Kidnapped princess.

At first, I think she was simply comforting herself. But eventually . . .

I made her keep talking. Tell me more about this mother who loved her daughter. Tell me more about this daughter who knows one day she’ll make it home again.

We slowly but surely became allies, as the dollhouse darkened and twisted around us.

“I couldn’t pretend things were normal anymore,” Thomas says now, as if reading my mind. “At a certain point, even I understood most foster families didn’t have kids locked in towers, and normal deliverymen didn’t look so shady, nor lick their lips every time a girl walked into view.

“I confronted my mother. At least, I tried. I said we shouldn’t be a foster family anymore. I was worried about the girls. Couldn’t we just . . . go back to the way things used to be.

“‘What?’ My mother laughed at me. ‘You mean poor?’

“‘If you want to help the girls,’ she told me, ‘then the least you could do is assist with their medicine.’ Which is how at the age of fourteen, I started driving our car into town, meeting with ‘business associates,’ then returning to the home with drugs. I wasn’t even legal to drive. Meaning that of course I was extra careful every inch of the way, terrified that I’d be pulled over by some cop. My mother had no patience for fools, not even her own son.”

I look up at him. “You became a dope dealer. You made all the purchases. You kept us drugged out of our skulls!”

Thomas doesn’t deny it. “Where would I have gone, Nicky? What would I have done if my mother turned me out? Her gift was equal culpability. She turned us all into her partners in crime. Then none of us could escape, because all of us were too terrified of the consequences.”

I want to argue with him. I want to yell and scream because it would be easier to blame him. Maybe once, I even did. But now I have an image in my head. A teenage boy with a mop of brown hair, all arms and legs, striding down the front steps of the house, moving with purpose. At the last moment, turning, looking back. The expression on his face. Frustration and longing and rage. Before turning once more toward the vehicle.