“I thought it was pretty cut-and-dried,” I said. I hoped it wasn’t the lack of a murder weapon. Currently in some hospital disposal holding area.

“Main problem is he says he wasn’t in town at the time of his father’s death. And we can’t prove he was yet.”

“Isn’t there a shed back there? At the edge of that property on Haymere?” I asked, gesturing toward the back of my house. “He could’ve been staying there, right?”

She cut her eyes to me again, in the way I’d come to understand: that I had just given something away about myself. Like she had been trying to unravel me, as I had her. Both of us trying to prove ourselves here.

I turned on the faucet with my elbow, then held the glass under the sink.

“Why are you holding your arm like that?” she asked.

“Oh.” I handed her the glass. “It’s been getting worse. I thought it was okay yesterday, but I can barely move it now.”

“Did Nathan do that?”

I nodded. “He grabbed me when he was chasing me. I felt something snap, or pop, but it was okay until this morning.”

She stood up, stepped closer. “Did you get it checked out?”

“No. I can take some pain medicine, see if that helps first.”

She left her glass in the sink. “It can help the case, Olivia. If Nathan harmed you during the assault, it will help in the trial. We need to get it documented.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll get it checked out.”

She took her keys from the pocket of her slacks. “I can’t let you drive like that. Come on, I’ll take you.”

———

THE SECOND TIME I was in Detective Rigby’s car, I had a better handle on her.

She continued the conversation as we pulled out of my driveway. “If there’s anything else you’re not telling me, now would be the time, Olivia.”

Her tone could be savage; it was growing on me. I thought we might’ve been friends under different circumstances. But I didn’t know how much she knew, or just suspected.

“Did you find the papers in his hotel? He’s been obsessed with me for years.”

“We did,” she said. “And like I said, the folks in Widow Hills have charged him with stalking and assault. I’m asking about anything else here.”

Detective Rigby wasn’t convinced yet, though it seemed she was trying. I knew how it could be, to try to shift your perspective, to allow the possibility of a different truth—and to have someone else do it for you. But I needed her to see that it was neither me nor Rick but an angry Nathan Coleman.

“I think Sean Coleman was trying to warn me that his son was coming. And that’s why Nathan killed him.” He had motive, he had drive, he had years of pent-up anger, revenge, desire—for himself and what he was owed.

“Sean Coleman was killed where he stood. There didn’t seem to be a struggle. I think there was an element of surprise,” she said.

“Look at the size of Nathan.” He’d be able to overpower someone fairly easily. He’d done it to me.

“Mm,” she said, looking at me briefly instead.

In my head, I could pull all the pieces together, with him at the center. But Detective Rigby was reluctant. Everything could be explained away by Nathan. He could’ve gotten into my house; he seemed to know the area, kept hanging around. He could’ve taken the box cutter, confronted his father, tried to frame the whole thing on me—another type of story, like he said. A different one, that set him as victim this time, that he could exploit for his benefit.

But the detective was more focused on the fragments that still remained, just like Nathan had been, from a story twenty years earlier. Hung up on the details that didn’t quite fit.

“Here’s where I keep getting stuck, Olivia. You said the phone woke you that night,” she said. “That’s how you found the body.”

“Yes.” I didn’t like how she was circling back, just as she had done that very first day, focusing on the specifics.

“It was a call from a burner phone. Can’t trace those.” She repositioned her hands on the steering wheel.

“Nathan,” I said.

“You think he called his father’s phone so someone would find the body?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. It made sense to me, those conflicted feelings about a parent you’d lost contact with. The guilt that could haunt you after. Maybe he thought, hopelessly, that his father could still be saved.

“I know he said they weren’t close, but there were several calls from Nathan to his father in the weeks prior.”

I nodded, encouraging her. Nathan had told me that he’d gone to his father, who had refused to help. That must’ve been when Sean decided to do something—to come here and warn me. And Nathan must’ve found out somehow.

She turned onto the main road, eyes narrowed, gaze out the window. “He thinks the story isn’t true,” she said. “About what happened twenty years ago.”

So he was talking. He was telling his side, trying to shake everything loose. The story, threatening to unravel. “I know,” I said. “But does it matter?”

He had killed over it, been driven by this singular focus. He had confessed to me that he had blackmailed my mother because of it—but I couldn’t tell the detective that part. Not without exposing all the rest.

But maybe she knew. She must’ve seen those letters in Nathan’s hotel room, and she knew he had been after us for something.

Your mother sure did pay up, Nathan had said. His words echoing. My mother had thought she was being contacted by Sean Coleman, the man who rescued me, and she had paid him off. Something I’d have to come face-to-face with. Except I’d thought Nathan was leading me down a path, manipulating me, until I couldn’t see another possibility.

His words about the 911 calls, my mother, the injury. The underground cellar, the cinder-block walls. I shook the image. He could’ve been lying. Playing me.

My mother could’ve paid because she knew that the words, and the implication, were enough on their own to damage us both. He was creating chaos with the story even now.

But the fact remained that I was prone to sleepwalking. It was true now, so it must’ve been true then.

“Well, we’ll get there eventually,” she said. “Like I said, these things take time.” But I wondered how much experience she had with cases like this in a small county. Whether the loose threads would gnaw at her, as they did Nathan, driving her to some other belief. Whether I would ever be free of this.

“I’m just glad,” she said, “that someone saw him following you there and could sense it wasn’t right.” The sign for the hospital came up, and she took the exit, the same route I took to work every day. “You know that call was anonymous?”

“The officers there mentioned it,” I said. Something surprising and not. The town of Widow Hills, protecting its people. Knowing who belonged and who didn’t. It would be almost supernatural, if not for the realization that people there had come to value their privacy.

But I had a feeling that maybe it was Emma Lyons—that she’d known where I was going, and had someone watching me, keeping me safe, a true guardian angel. Maybe she was more worried about Nathan than she let on. I’d have to ask her one day, when this was all behind us.