BACK IN THE STATION
“Please, tell me again what happened after you hung up with Miss Paxton.” Detective Quinlan handed Laurel, Emma, and Thayer each a cup of hot chocolate, his eyes bright over the deep lines of exhaustion
carved underneath. It was after midnight, but the arresting officer had called Quinlan at home. He’d arrived at the station still buttoning his shirt, his hair disheveled but his expression alert and edgy.
“I called Thayer,” Laurel said. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold. She darted a furtive glance at Emma, then turned back to Quinlan. “He picked me up, and we went to Dr. Banerjee’s house, though I
didn’t see Ethan’s car anywhere. We looked in all the windows and couldn’t see anyone inside.”
The three of them were sitting on a vinyl couch in a room that was clearly meant for children. Cartoon tigers and monkeys grinned from the jungle-themed wallpaper. A dairy crate of broken toys sat on the
floor next to a rug decorated with a hopscotch pattern. Emma stared blankly at a wooden labyrinth game atop of a stack of Highlights magazines. Her eyes traced the lines of the puzzle, her thoughts as lost
and wandering as if she were in a real maze.
So far, Quinlan had let Laurel and Thayer do most of the talking, and she was grateful. She tried to take a sip of the hot chocolate, but her hand was shaking, so she carefully set it down. Her body ached to
the bone. Images shot randomly through her mind, unbidden and startling. The glint of the knife in Ethan’s hand. Sutton’s decomposed body, her empty eye sockets staring out at the sky. Ethan’s face leaning
toward her for a kiss, his eyes heavy-lidded. Ethan’s fingers laced through her own. She shuddered at each one. Everything she’d known, everything she’d believed had been a lie—and now there was nothing
left for her to hold on to.
“How did you know they’d gone to the canyon?” Quinlan asked, rubbing the stubble on his jaw.
Laurel stared down into her hot chocolate. “It was a hunch. We thought he might take her back to the same place he’d killed Sutton. We knew we were right when we saw his car near the entrance. So we called
the cops and followed them.”
Quinlan’s mustache twitched. “After the 911 operator told you not to give chase.”
“We weren’t just going to sit there and do nothing,” Thayer broke in angrily. “We didn’t know how long it would take the cops to get there.”
“And it’s a good thing we did follow,” Laurel added sharply. “He was about to kill her.”
Emma looked up at the detective then. His normally hard gray eyes had softened, and they came to rest on her. She swallowed. “They’re right. Ethan would have killed me if they weren’t there to stop him.”
The EMTs had bandaged the cut he’d made at her throat—it had scarcely scratched the surface, but now it seemed to throb with her heartbeat.
She reached for her cup again and took another sip of the hot chocolate. It was the cheap, just-add-water kind, but it was soothing and sweet. The knots in her stomach loosened a little from its warmth.
Thayer and Laurel sat protectively on either side of her. Laurel’s leg was touching Emma’s, and Thayer’s hand rested between her shoulders, warm and gentle. She didn’t feel safe, exactly—she wasn’t sure
she’d ever feel safe again. But they had rescued her and hadn’t left her side since. Through the swirling, heartbreaking confusion of shock and grief, a sense of gratitude filled her. She’d lost so much.
But she hadn’t lost them.
I focused on Thayer. He was pale and tired, the vulnerable expression in his eyes contrasting with the fierce set of his jaw. That was what I had always loved about him—how strong he was, and how deeply he
felt.
Quinlan clasped his hands around one knee, jogging his loafer up and down. “I owe you an apology, Miss Paxton. You and Sutton both.” He sighed, opening a bristling file folder. “We’ve actually been
interested in Ethan for a little while now. I’ve been going over the parking-lot surveillance photos from the last few months, and he shows up in dozens of them. He’s out there all the time. It seemed like
. . .”
“Too much of a coincidence,” Emma said miserably. He nodded.
“Detectives don’t believe in coincidences,” he said. “So we started to look into him. At first I thought he was your accomplice. That you guys had hatched this plan together, maybe, or that he’d fallen
for you and you’d roped him into it. But this morning we found out he had a sealed record. We put in a subpoena to open it, but it didn’t get finalized until tonight, after we’d already taken him into
custody.”