It had been over a year since the last time I’d seen him.
“Cassie.” My father greeted me with a stiff smile, a shade or two off from the real deal.
My thoughts went to Michael. He would have known exactly how to read the tension in my father’s face. In contrast, I was a profiler. I could take a collection of tiny details—the contents of a person’s suitcase, the words they chose to say hello—and build the big picture: who they were, what they wanted, how they would behave in any given situation.
But the exact meaning of that not-quite-a-smile? The emotions my father was hiding? Whether he felt a spark of recognition or pride or anything fatherly at all when he looked at me?
That, I didn’t know.
“Cassandra,” Nonna chided, “say hello to your father.” Before I had a chance to say anything, Nonna had latched her arms around him, squeezing tightly. She kissed him, then smacked him several times, then kissed him again.
“You are back early.” Nonna finally pried herself away from the prodigal son. She gave him a look—probably the same look she’d given him when he’d tracked dirt in on her carpet as a little boy. “Why?”
My father’s gaze flitted back to me. “I need to talk to Cassie.”
Nonna’s eyes narrowed. “And what is it you need to talk to our Cassie about?” Nonna poked him in the chest. Repeatedly. “She is happy at her new school, with her skinny boyfriend.”
I barely registered that assertion. My attention was fully focused on my father. He was slightly disheveled. He looked like he hadn’t slept at all the night before. He couldn’t quite look me in the eye.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Nonna said, with the force of a sheriff declaring martial law. “Nothing is wrong.” She turned back to my father. “You tell her nothing is wrong,” she ordered.
My father crossed the room and took my shoulders gently in his hands.
You’re not normally this gentle.
My brain ran through everything I knew about him—our relationship, the type of person he was, the fact that he was here at all. My stomach felt like it had been lined with lead. I knew with sudden prescience what he was going to say. The knowledge paralyzed me. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t blink.
“Cassie,” my father said softly. “It’s about your mother.”
There was a difference between presumed dead and dead, a difference between coming back to a dressing room that was drenched in my mother’s blood and being told that after five long years, there was a body.
When I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, I had prayed every night that someone would find my mother, that the police would be proven wrong, that somehow, despite the evidence, despite the amount of blood she’d lost, she’d turn up. Alive.
Eventually, I had stopped hoping and started praying that the authorities would find my mother’s body. I had imagined being called in to identify the remains. I’d imagined saying good-bye. I had imagined burying her.
I hadn’t imagined this.
“They’re sure it’s her?” I asked, my voice small, but steady.
My father and I were sitting on opposite sides of a porch swing, just the two of us, the closest thing to privacy Nonna’s house could afford.
“The location’s right.” He didn’t look at me as he replied, staring out into the night. “So is the timing. They’re trying to match dental records, but you two moved around so much….” He seemed to realize, then, that he was telling me something I already knew.
My mother’s dental records would be hard to come by.
“They found this.” My father held out a thin silver chain. A small red stone hung on the end.
My throat closed up.
Hers.
I swallowed, pushing the thought down, like I could unthink it by sheer force of will. My father tried to hand me the necklace. I shook my head.
Hers.
I’d known my mother was almost certainly dead. I’d known that. I’d believed it. But now, looking at the necklace she’d worn that night, I couldn’t breathe.
“That’s evidence.” I forced the words out. “The police shouldn’t have given it to you. It’s evidence.”
What were they thinking? I’d only been working with the FBI for six months. Almost all of that time had been spent behind the scenes, and even I knew you didn’t break chain of evidence just so a halfway-orphaned girl could have something that had belonged to her mother.
“There weren’t any prints on it,” my father assured me. “Or trace evidence.”
“Tell them to keep it,” I ground out, standing up and walking to the edge of the porch. “They may need it. For identification.”
It had been five years. If they were looking for dental records, there probably wasn’t anything left for me to identify. Nothing but bones.
“Cassie—”
I tuned out. I didn’t want to listen to a man who’d barely known my mother telling me that the police had no leads, that they thought it was all right to compromise evidence, because none of them expected this case to be solved.
After five years, we had a body. That was a lead. Notches in the bones. The way she was buried. The place her killer had laid her to rest. There had to be something. Some hint of what had happened.
He came after you with a knife. I slipped into my mother’s perspective, trying to work out what had happened that day, as I had so many times before. He surprised you. You fought.