“Jace Riggs is yours.”

The file landed on the desk in front of me with a slap. I looked up and saw my colleague and boss, John White, turning to leave my office already.

“What?” I asked. “Where are you going?”

“Home,” he said. “My daughter has the flu.”

I checked the clock. A quarter to one. “Is he one o’clock?” I asked in a panic.

John waved a hand over his shoulder. “You didn’t have a one o’clock anyway. I checked.”

He was still walking, so I got up, moved around my desk, and followed him. “I don’t know him,” I said.

“Neither do I.”

“What am I trying to do here?”

“The usual. Read the file.”

“I have fifteen minutes, John,” I said. “Give me the rundown.”

We were across the hall in his office now, and he sighed as he looked around for his keys. “Riggs,” he said. “The name mean anything to you?”

“No. Should it?”

He smiled at me. He was a decent guy in a not-too-expensive suit, going home to his sick kid. “I thought you’d lived in Westlake all your life.”

“I moved here when I was ten.”

“Then you should know the Riggs family. Everyone does. They live in that property on Welmer, on the other side of the tracks.”

I knew it. It was a big plot with a big house on it, but it was run-down. Probably someone rich had built the place, but now it was a mess with weeds in the yard, in a part of town no one went to if they could help it.

“Mike Riggs has four sons,” John said. “Not all from one woman, as I recall. In any case, the women left years ago. The sons are all trouble. Mike himself is currently incarcerated for vehicular attempted murder. That is, he tried to run someone over in his car while they were having a drunken argument.”

I winced. “Ouch.”

“While Mike’s been inside, it’s also come out that he was running a stolen car business through the body shop he owns, Riggs Auto. The whole thing is being dismantled by the Westlake PD, so Mike Riggs is not going to walk free anytime soon. You’re about to see one of his sons. Birth name John Christian, which is shortened to J. C., which in turn is shortened to Jace. It’s all anyone has ever called him. He just did twenty months for grand theft auto.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling a little deflated already. It was always hardest to work with someone who was following a family pattern. “Like father, like son.”

“Probably,” John said. He had found his keys and we left his office so he could lock the door. “Jace is twenty-five, no priors, no violent history. Drug and alcohol tests have all come in clean. His PO says that when he did random checks at the halfway house, he usually found the kid reading a book. He says if Jace was putting him on, it was pretty convincing.”

“People read books,” I argued.

“Guys like Jace Riggs don’t read books,” John said. “What you’re doing is a court-mandated session to make sure he’s adjusting to civilian life. Talk to him for an hour, write something in the file, and move on.”

“And if he’s not adjusting?” I asked.

“Then see him two or three times, write something in the file, and move on,” John said. “You know how it goes, Tara. You’ve been doing this for a while now. I have to go.”

I stood in the hallway after he left. He was right, I’d been doing this for a while, though it didn’t feel like long to me. I was still the junior counselor here because I’d only graduated three years ago. John ran an office of psychiatrists and psychologists that took a mix of paying clients and court-mandated cases. The paying clients were more profitable, but John said he believed in not only making money but helping people who had been pushed, as he put it, to the bottom of the pile.

It was kind of him, but it didn’t stop him from taking the top clients for himself and leaving the bottom of the pile to me.

Not that I saw Jace Riggs as beneath me. I didn’t. One of the reasons I became a licensed psychological counselor was because I believed that everyone, even people who had done wrong, deserved to get help if they needed it. But John was right, this was a routine case. All I had to do was ask Jace Riggs a few questions, let him talk for an hour, and put his file away forever.

Still, I leafed through the file as I waited for him to show up. It was surprisingly thin. Aside from his family life, Jace Riggs wasn’t the kind of guy who went to prison. No juvenile record, no addiction, no history of abuse. If he hadn’t started stealing cars, he wouldn’t be in the system at all.

I was pondering that, curious, when the door opened and he walked in.

I had been ready for a lot of things in my life. Ready to move out, away from my parents. Ready to end my long-term relationship with Kyle, my last boyfriend and the guy I almost married. Ready to start this career and work hard at it, no matter what it took.

I was not ready for Jace Riggs.