“Especially if you haven’t had any sleep.”

“I caught it before he left for the airport. Got him on a flight that left the next day. Put in a comp request for an extra night at the hotel.”

“Has he complained?”

“Survey review’s at the end of each month. We’ll see.”

Dylan nods.

“I don’t want to take anything, Doc,” she says once the silence between them becomes uncomfortable.

“All right, well, let’s talk about that.”

“I don’t want to swallow a bunch of pills just to feel normal.”

“That’s not exactly an accurate description of the treatment options we’ve discussed.”

“Please, I just . . . I don’t want to talk about it.”

“That’s exactly why we should talk about it. It’s not about the medication. It’s about your belief that accepting that kind of help is admitting unacceptable weakness.”

“There’s no pill out there that’s gonna change my past.”

“True. But we’re not talking about changing your past.”

“Then what are we talking about?”

“We’re talking about a bridge, Charley. A temporary solution that will allow you to get some sleep. That will reduce your anxiety just enough you can leave the house for longer than it takes to come here or run to the grocery store. Maybe for as long as it takes to start forming some meaningful social relationships. Once you get in the habit of those things, they’ll be easier to do in the long term. Any medications we explore would be about helping you take the leap.”

A bridge. A leap. Which one is it, Doc?

“How sad is it that making conversation with the checker at the grocery store is taking a leap?” she asks.

“Charlotte, you were kidnapped as a baby. Your mother was murdered. You were held hostage for seven years by two psychopaths who isolated you from the world, who lied to you about who you were. Who tried to turn you into someone like them. And when you were returned to your father, he exploited you at every turn and without your consent. And, ironically, none of these traumas in your past are the source of your current anxiety.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I’m not. These events I just listed, they’ve made you incredibly strong. Resourceful, even.” Her expression must betray her doubt, because he sits forward, planting his elbows on his knees. “Charley, you emancipated yourself from your father as a teenager after you rejected his agenda for you in front of an audience of hundreds. As an adult, you went on to sue him—successfully, I might add—for money that was rightfully yours, money that allowed you to change your name and relocate.

“These are not the actions of a broken bird, Charley. You’re tired, for sure. You’re tired, and you’re still grieving your grandmother. Those two conditions have tricked you into believing you’re weak. And the longer you stay barricaded in that house, the bigger this lie becomes in your head.”

How long has he been waiting to say this to her? It’s the first time she’s seen him look nervous. On edge, even. Maybe he’s afraid she’ll walk out.

“You can admit that what happened to you made you stronger without celebrating the people who did those things to you. But to do that you’re going to need a bigger push than I can give you in here.”

Maybe this is why she keeps coming back to Dr. Thorpe. Because he’s the first person she’s met in years who can make her cry just by stating the truth.

And if I can cry, she thinks, if I can cry, then I’m not the sick and damaged killer those movies made everyone believe I was.

His expression is fixed as he reaches across his desk and hands her a box of tissues.

There’s a soft buzz that sounds like it’s coming from her phone, but when she looks to where she thought she left it, on the edge of Thorpe’s desk, it’s not there.

“It’s mine,” Dylan says. “Sorry, I thought I turned it off.”

“Where’s mine?”

“Stay focused, Charley. I think we’re onto something here.”

“OK. It’s just . . . it’s hard to focus right now.”

“Because you need some sleep?”

“Yeah,” she finally says. “I need some sleep. It’s just . . .”

“What, Charley?”

“There were pills before.”

Dylan seems genuinely concerned. For Christ’s sake, it’s not like she’s about to disclose she was molested. But that’s how he’s acting.

“You’ve tried medication before?” he asks.

“My father tried medication. On me. When I was ten.”

Dylan nods, and his expression is grim. “And what prompted your father to put you on medication back then?”

“I started complaining. About the appearances. The movies.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

“Your father drugged you to silence you, and so you’re afraid that’s what I’m trying to do to you now.”

“It’s not like it worked. I started hiding the drugs after a few weeks.”

“But you stopped complaining, didn’t you?”

“For a while.”

“From age ten to age sixteen is a long while.”

“I guess.” Christ, she sounds sixteen. She’s even staring down at her lap now like a sullen teenager.

“I’m not trying to silence you, Charley. I didn’t reach out to you and offer my ear because I thought what you needed was more silence. Quite the opposite, in fact. And I can assure you that if you decide to go the medication route this time, it’ll be entirely different.”

“How can you assure me of that?”

“Because this time the choice will be yours.”

3

Access Denied.

Jason isn’t surprised when these words appear on the keypad’s display.

He never expected to crack her code on the first try.

There’s no telling exactly what type of security system she has; she hasn’t posted a sign next to her driveway like a suburban family would.

She doesn’t really have a driveway. Just a strip of tire-scuffed earth that looks a little smoother than the surrounding desert. It leads to a reinforced-steel garage door that, like the rest of her squat, one-story stucco house, is painted the common colors of the Sonoran. The paint does its job. The house is pretty much camouflaged from the nearest road. But he had no trouble finding the place with the directions the Savior gave him.

Given his research into alarm systems, he figures he’s got about three more tries before he’s locked out or the alarm company alerts local law enforcement.

The nearest police station is just inside the Scarlet town line, a thirty-minute drive away. So if he does get locked out, he’ll have time to race back to the dried-out arroyo where he hid his car. Then he’ll have to reassess.

He has to teach Trina that her defenses against him are useless, and he can only do that by getting inside her house, by showing her that he belongs there, that their union is inevitable. On the basis of his e-mails, the Savior seems to understand this. He sent Jason a list of possible code words—objects and places with a special meaning to her, terse descriptions of her favorite memories—and strings of relevant numbers—her birthday, her birth mother’s birthday—that might be the basis of her alarm code.

If he cracks the code, he’s in.

She’s afraid of keys, the Savior told him. They’re too easily lost, too easily stolen or copied. The idea behind a security system like hers is to make sure no door is ever left unlocked by mistake and to eliminate any exposed mechanisms that might allow an intruder access to the locks themselves. The cylinder inside each is several inches deeper than your average dead bolt, too deep to be jimmied open by even the most skilled locksmith. And in the absence of a key mechanism, you’d have to tear apart the door frame or the adjacent wall to even try for access to the lock itself. The code unlocks a specific series of doors for several minutes, and then they lock again automatically. It’s the kind of system usually reserved for vaults or other storage facilities that rarely see human visitors, and Trina’s installed it in her own home.

Can she not see how desperate this is, how it smacks of someone denying the inevitable?

Chances are the system includes smoke detectors that disengage all the locks in case of a fire. But what if something else happened to her out here? What if she had a heart attack or was bitten by a snake and she couldn’t enter the code and so EMS couldn’t get to her?

Stupid. So stupid.

Not stupid, he reminds himself. Just misguided, that’s all.

He scans the words and numbers again.

The meaning of some are clear to him thanks to his study of Lowell Pierce’s book—bluebird, for instance, Joyce Collins, her birth mother’s maiden name—but the others he doesn’t understand. As he reads over them now, he feels a surge of jealousy.

The Savior knows why these words are precious to her. The Savior knows more about her than Jason’s managed to learn in a decade. Whoever the Savior is, they’ve come to the same conclusion Jason did years ago. That Trina was taught the cleansing power of murder at a young age, and with every day she refuses to put this lesson to good use, her soul dies a little bit more.