“Four willing volunteers gave their lives so we could try to make it work. We weren’t out to create a Superman pill. We wanted to formulate something that could seize on the biochemical process of panic itself and transform it into efficiency, competency, responsiveness.”

“Survival,” she whispers before she can stop herself.

He looks into her eyes, smiles slightly. Pleased, no doubt, that she’s just parroted the word he used to justify his actions the night Jason almost raped her.

“Exactly,” he says. “The strength was an unexpected by-product. And one with undeniable defense industry implications that I will admit I did use to secure funding for our further development.”

“But it didn’t work. So you decided to put my life at risk.”

“I knew it would work in you. I had a theory. I was right.”

“What was your theory?”

“Our tests used combat veterans. People who’d been through extreme physical trauma. Trauma so severe it had reshaped their neural pathways. With you, that wasn’t a concern.”

“You’re saying my life’s been free of trauma?”

“Your life is full of grief, betrayal, and loss. But the only time you were ever held down against your will was when the SWAT team saved you from this place. You’ve never been shot or even shot at, much less beaten, violated. The threat of those things has been ever present in your life, as it is in so many lives. But it never manifested.”

“Until you sent Jason to my house.”

“Yes. And we all saw how that went.”

“I don’t believe you, Noah.”

He closes his eyes at this use of his old name. What’s he trying to summon? Patience or violence?

“Which part?” he finally asks quietly.

“I don’t believe you were so confident your pill wouldn’t kill me. I think you thought I was expendable.”

“How, Charlotte?”

They’re thoughts that have only come to her in the past few days, so she’s afraid she might have trouble articulating them now, but when she starts to speak, the words come easily. Is she saddened or relieved to be saying these things? “I think you tracked me down because you knew who I was. And you hated me. You thought I’d made money off the Bannings, off your mother’s murder. You’d already lost a female subject. Maybe it was someone you cared about. Now you needed one you wouldn’t care about at all.”

“Interesting,” he says. “So naturally I spent three months getting to know you so that I wouldn’t be attached when you went lycan on me and I had to destroy you?”

“Those three months gave you everything you needed to set up your test.”

“Two weeks gave me everything I needed to set up my test. You were desperate for someone to talk to, and after our first session you rarely held back.”

“Better for you then.”

“But that’s not why I was there. Not in the beginning.”

She’s startled by his conviction, but he doesn’t rush to say more.

“Why were you there?” she asks.

“I wanted to know who you really were. You’re right. I hated you. Ever since I found out who my mother really was, what had happened to her, I hated you. I’d read your father’s crass, manipulative, disingenuous book. I’d watched every single one of those disgusting films, knowing you got a share of the profits. And I’d never believed a word you’d said in front of a camera. I thought it was all for show, all for money. Even storming offstage on your father like that. Just a teenager getting bored with her old act. And I thought deep down, you probably hated your father because you loved them more. Abigail and Daniel. Your real parents. In short, I believed everything about you that you didn’t want the world to believe.”

She’s never seen him this angry. It takes a form as penetrating and focused as every other intense swell of emotion he’s displayed.

“And then?” she asks.

“And then, one day, I saw you standing over my mother’s grave.”

For a second she’s got no idea what he’s talking about. Then she remembers. The road trip. The road trip she wrote about in her journal only days before.

“After Cole shut down the project, it was like my one connection to my mother died. I wandered around for a bit, but I ended up in Asheville, where she lived. I was trying to put together pieces of her life. And then one day, I walked out to her grave, and there you were. Burning Girl. And you were crying.

“I’d seen the news. I’d read about the lawsuit. I knew you’d won. But you weren’t off vacationing on some island. Instead you’d traveled across the country to bring my mother her favorite flower. And that’s when I realized, we don’t get to pick the other survivors of the shipwreck, and on our darkest days, they’re all we have. So I decided to find out who you really were.”

“You followed me all the way to Arizona?”

“I followed you back to Asheville. Heard you use your new name. I used that to do the rest.”

“The rest . . . pretending to be a therapist. Lying to me.”

“It was not my best plan. In the beginning, it wasn’t really a plan at all. It was . . .”

“What?” she asks. “What was it?”

“Hope.”

“For what, Noah?”

He whirls, a visible pulse in one corner of his jaw. “I call you by the name you’ve chosen. Can you do me the same favor?”

“You didn’t do me any favors, Dylan.”

His shame, if that’s truly what it is, shows itself in the quick breath he sucks in through his nostrils, the speed with which he looks out into the woods beyond.

Should she tell him they’re being watched? Shouldn’t he already know? After all, he’s worked with Cole Graydon far longer than she has.

“So who was I?” she asks. “When you finally got to know the real me, who did I turn out to be?”

“You were everything I said you were during our sessions. Brave but deluded. Convinced you were weak simply because you were grief stricken and exhausted. But on a fundamental level, what you’d been through had turned you into something I’d never anticipated. Someone resourceful, determined, honest. But in need of a push.”

“A push?”

“Do you regret it, Charley? Not our sessions. Not what I had to do with Jason. The Mask Maker. Do you regret it? Do you regret bringing him down?”

“Is that what you expected me to do?”

“Never in a million years,” he says with a warm, contented smile.

“Then maybe you didn’t get to know the real me after all.”

“Maybe,” he whispers, his smile fading but his stare growing more intense, as if he’s convinced he might learn more about her in this single moment than he did during those three months.

“You said in the beginning, I was hope. Not for . . . your drug, but for something else. What, Dylan? Hope for what?”

He’s studying the view beyond the collapsed walls now. He’s searching the woods; she’s sure of it. Searching for the glint of sunlight off binoculars or a rifle’s scope. But he doesn’t seem frightened.

“Dylan?”

“I thought you might have seen her. When they brought her here.”

“Your mother?” she asks.

He nods.

“I didn’t,” she whispers. “I never saw any of them. I’m sorry. I would tell you the truth if I had.”

“I know,” he whispers back. “I know.”

Either he hasn’t seen what he expected to out in the woods, or he’s given up looking for it. He turns to her now.

“Forgive me, Charley. It wasn’t my plan to involve Cole and Graydon right away. I didn’t want to snare you in their net so soon. I thought we’d have time. I thought we’d have time to work together. To come to an understanding.

“I knew you’d see the worth of what I was trying to do. The implications. For our mothers. For women everywhere who live in fear. For people everywhere who live in fear, overpowered and silenced and erased by those who lack morals or possess brute strength . . .” He studies the altars all around them, and she wonders if these general, academic words are the closest he can come to describing his mother’s murderers in any kind of detail. “Or are pure evil.”

There’s a tremor in his voice when he speaks these last two words. He’s turned in to the shadows so he can face her. If there are tears in his eyes, she can’t see them.

“I take it Cole’s made it clear he has a continued desire to work with you,” he says.

“He has.”

“Has he said what will happen if you turn him down?”

She can’t bring herself to lie, but she can’t bring herself to answer, either.

He looks up, stricken by her silence.

“What has he said to you?” she finally asks.

“That your decision will determine everything.” She nods, avoiding his stare for the first time since entering the house.

“Has he offered you a graceful exit plan by chance?” he asks.

I look forward to seeing your decision. Black and white. Staring back at her from her phone’s screen. She imagines a bullet striking Dylan between the eyes right there if she . . . does what? Runs from the cabin in tears? Slaps him? Or is the place bugged and Cole’s listening to their every word right now?

“Not graceful,” she says. “No.”

He steps forward. Behind her, Luke stiffens and matches Dylan’s step with two of his own. But Dylan doesn’t go any farther, and she realizes he’s searching her expression as intensely as he did the woods outside.