By the time we got back to the house, it was almost dark. Lia, Dean, and Sloane were sitting on the front porch, waiting for me. Michael was taking a sledgehammer to the cracked windows of the junkyard car.
Every time he took a swing, every piece of glass he shattered, I felt something shattering inside me.
He knew.
From the moment Dean had come back to the house, from the moment Michael had laid eyes on him, he knew.
I didn’t mean for this to happen. I didn’t plan it.
Michael looked up and caught sight of me, as if my thoughts had somehow made their way from my mind to his. He studied me, the way he had the first day we’d met, before I’d known what he could do.
“That’s it, then?” he asked me.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. My eyes darted toward the porch. Toward Dean.
Michael gave me a careless smile. “You win some, you lose some,” he said with a shrug. Like I’d never been anything more than a game. Like I didn’t matter.
Because he wouldn’t let me matter anymore.
“It’s just as well,” he continued, each word a calculated shot to my heart. “Maybe if Redding’s getting some, he’ll finally loosen up.”
I knew, objectively, what this was. If you can’t keep them from hitting you, you make them hit you. That didn’t stop his words from cutting into me. The bruises and scrapes, the pounding in my head—it all faded away under Michael’s casual cruelty, his utter indifference.
I’d known that choosing would mean losing one of them. I just hadn’t imagined losing Michael like this.
I turned back to the house, willing myself not to cry. Dean stood. His eyes met mine, and I allowed myself to go back to the moment in the woods—and all of the moments that had led up to it. Holding his hand, tracing my fingertips along his jawline. The secrets we’d traded. The things that no one else—Natural or not, profiler or not—would ever understand.
If I’d chosen Michael, Dean would have understood.
I started walking toward the porch, toward Dean, my pace gaining with each step. Michael’s voice called after me.
“Cassie?”
There was a hint of genuine emotion in his voice—just a hint of something, but I couldn’t tell what. I looked back over my shoulder, but didn’t turn around.
“Yes?”
Michael stared at me, his hazel eyes holding a mixture of emotions I couldn’t quite parse. “If it had been me in the woods, if I’d been the one to go with Briggs, if I’d been the one you saw at the exact second…”
Would it have been me? He didn’t finish the question, and I didn’t answer it. As I turned back toward the house, he went back to knocking the windows out of that broken, battered car.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice carrying on the wind. “That’s what I thought.”
The day the last of my bruises disappeared was the day that we took the GED. It was also the day that Agent Sterling moved back into the house.
When the five of us arrived back from taking the exam, she was directing movers, her own arms loaded down with a large box. Her hair was pulled into a loose ponytail at the base of her neck, stray hairs plastered to her forehead with sweat. She was wearing jeans.
I took in the changes in her appearance and the fact that Briggs’s possessions were being carted out of his study. Something had shifted. Whatever soul-searching she’d been doing, whatever memories our captivity had stirred up, she’d reached some kind of resolution. Something she could live with.
Beside me, Dean stared after Sterling as she disappeared into her room. I wondered if he was thinking about the woman he’d known five years ago. I wondered what relationship she bore to the woman in front of us now.
“Think it’s therapeutic to have all her ex-husband’s stuff hauled out of this house?” Michael asked as a pair of movers walked by with Briggs’s desk.
“One way to find out.” Lia strolled in the direction Sterling had gone. A split second later, the rest of us followed.
Almost all traces of Briggs had been removed from the room, which now boasted an actual bed in place of the fold-out couch. Sterling’s back was to us as she placed the box on the bed and began opening it. “How did the test go?” she asked without turning around.
“Splendidly,” Lia replied. She twirled a strand of dark hair around her index finger. “How was federally mandated psychological evaluation?”
“So-so.” Sterling turned to face us. “How are you doing, Cassie?” she asked. Something in her tone told me that she knew the answer.
Some people said that broken bones grew back stronger. On the good days, I told myself that was true, that each time the world tried to break me, I became a little less breakable. On the bad days, I suspected that I would always be broken, that parts of me would never be quite right—and that those were the parts that made me good at the job.
Those were the parts that made this house and the people in it home.