“What’s her name?”
“Why do you need to know?” This time, Agent Sterling’s voice got loud enough that I would have heard it even if I hadn’t been standing right outside the door. “You tell me that, and I’ll answer your question.”
“I just do.”
“Not good enough, Dean.”
Silence. Neither one of them spoke for at least a minute. The sound of my own breathing seemed unbearably loud. I was sure that any second, one of them would come storming out. They’d discover me standing here, listening at the door to a conversation that I knew was more private than anything Dean had told me.
But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even remember how.
“Her name was Gloria.” That was Dean, not Sterling, so I wasn’t sure who the her in question was. “He introduced her to me. He made her say my name. He asked her if she’d like to be my mom. I was nine. I told him I didn’t want a new mother. And he looked at Gloria and said, ‘That’s a shame.’”
“You didn’t know.” Sterling’s voice was quiet again, but still high enough in pitch that the words carried.
“And once I did know,” Dean replied, his voice on the edge of breaking, “he wouldn’t tell me their names.”
Another torturously long silence. The vicious beating of my own heart drowned out the sound of my breathing. I took a step backward, a tiny, silent step.
I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be listening to this.
I turned, but even with my back to the door, I heard Agent Sterling answer Dean’s question. “The girl’s name was Emerson Cole.”
Back in my own bed, I closed my eyes and tried not to think about what I’d overheard, as if by pushing it out of my mind, I could make up for the fact that I’d listened at the door for far too long.
I failed.
Dean and Agent Sterling hadn’t just met each other before. They knew each other. They had history. Stop thinking about it, I told myself. Don’t do this. I couldn’t stop, any more than Sloane would have been able to see a mathematical equation without calculating the answer.
Dean made you a promise once, Agent Sterling, and whatever it was, he kept it. The closest I could come to granting Dean privacy was to try getting inside Agent Sterling’s head instead of his. You don’t like thinking about the Daniel Redding case. You care about Dean. Michael said you’re afraid to even look at him, but clearly, you don’t blame Dean for what his father did.
Another implication of their conversation finally sank in.
You know that Dean discovered what his father was doing, don’t you? You know that Daniel Redding made his son watch.
The words Dean had whispered to me the day before, the secret I’d been sure he’d never told anyone—she knew it, too. Somehow, that made it harder to hold on to my resentment against Agent Sterling.
You think you can protect him. You think if he doesn’t know what’s happening, it won’t affect him. That’s why you didn’t want to tell him Emerson’s name.
If Agent Sterling knew him so well, if she cared about Dean so much, why couldn’t she see that it was the not knowing that was going to kill him? It didn’t matter if this killer was just a copycat—the fact that Dean had needed to know the girl’s name told me he wouldn’t be able to make that separation in his mind.
He’d blame himself for this girl, the way he blamed himself for all the others.
I told him I didn’t want a new mother.
And Daniel Redding had replied, “That’s a shame.” In Dean’s mind—and maybe in his father’s—at least one of Daniel Redding’s victims had died because she wouldn’t make a suitable replacement mother for Dean.
Because Dean had said he didn’t want her.
So much for my resolution to stick to profiling Sterling instead of Dean.
Thwap. A small, cold projectile hit me in the side of the head. For a second, I thought I’d imagined it, and then—thwap.
I opened my eyes, turned toward the door, and wiped the side of my face, which was damp. By the time my eyes had adjusted to the light, I’d been pelted for a third time.
“Lia,” I hissed, keeping my voice to a whisper to avoid waking Sloane. “Quit throwing ice at me.”
Lia popped a piece of ice into her mouth and rolled it around with her tongue. Without a word, she beckoned me into the hallway. Fairly certain she would continue throwing ice at me until I agreed, I rolled out of bed and followed her into the hall. She closed the bedroom door behind us and pulled me into the nearby bathroom. Once she’d locked that door, she flipped the light switch on, and I realized that, in addition to the cup of ice she held in her left hand, she held a sparkly mint-green shirt in her right.
My eyes went from the clothes in Lia’s hands to the clothes she was wearing: black leather pants and a silver top that was held in place by a chain around her neck and had no back whatsoever.
“What are you wearing?” I asked.