“None of us had normal childhoods,” Sloane said quietly. “If we had, we wouldn’t be Naturals.”
“And on that note, I take my leave.” Michael stood up. He kept his voice casual, but I knew he didn’t like talking about his home life. He’d told me once that his father had an explosive temper. I tried not to think about the reasons a little boy might need to become an expert at reading other people’s emotions, growing up with a father like that.
Michael paused next to Sloane on his way out. “Hey,” he said softly. She peered up at him. “I’m not mad at you,” he told her. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Sloane smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I’ve got a lot of data to suggest I do or say the wrong thing at least eighty-six-point-five percent of the time.”
“Spoken like someone who wants to get tossed in the pool,” Michael countered. Sloane managed a genuine smile this time, and with one last glance back at me, Michael was gone.
“Do you think Dean went out to the garage?” Sloane asked after the two of us had been alone for several minutes. “When he’s upset, he usually goes out to the garage.”
Dean wasn’t just upset. I didn’t know the exact details of what he’d been through growing up, but the one time I’d asked Dean if he’d known what his father was doing to those women, Dean’s response had been not at first.
“Dean needs space,” I told Sloane, laying it out for her in case she couldn’t see it for herself. “Some people like having their friends around when things get tough, and some people need to be alone. When Dean’s ready to talk, he’ll talk.”
Even as I said the words, I knew I wouldn’t be able to just sit here, doing nothing. Waiting. I needed to do something—I just didn’t know what.
“Is he going to be okay?” Sloane asked me, her voice barely audible.
I couldn’t lie to her. “I don’t know.”
I ended up in the library. Wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor shelves held more books than I could read in two lifetimes. I hovered in the doorway. I wasn’t here for a book. Third shelf from the left, two up from the bottom. I swallowed hard, then walked over to the correct shelf. Interview twenty-eight, binder twelve.
My fingers closed around the correct binder, and I forced myself to pick it up. The last time I’d tried reading interview twenty-eight, I’d stopped when I’d registered the interviewee’s last name.
Lia was right. I didn’t fully understand what Dean was going through—but I wanted to. I needed to, because if it had been me spiraling into the abyss, Dean would have understood.
Dean always understood.
I sat down on the floor, propping the binder up on my thighs and opening to the page I’d left off on weeks before. Briggs was the agent conducting the prison interview. He’d just asked Dean’s father to verify the identity of one of his victims.
Redding: You’re asking the wrong questions, son. It’s not who they are, it’s what they are.
Briggs: And what are they?
Redding: They’re mine.
Briggs: Is that why you bound them with zip ties? Because they were yours?
Redding: You want me to say that I bound them so they’d stay. Your fancy FBI psychologists would salivate to hear me talk about all the women who’ve left me. About my mother and the mother of my son. But did you ever think that maybe I just like the way a woman’s skin looks when she struggles against the hold of the plastic? Maybe I liked watching white lines appear on their wrists and ankles, watching their hands and feet go numb. Maybe the way their muscles tensed and some of them fought themselves bloody while I sat there and watched…Can you imagine, Agent Briggs? Can you?
Briggs: And branding them? Are you going to tell me that wasn’t a mark of ownership? That owning them, dominating them, controlling them—that wasn’t the point?
Redding: The point? Who says there’s a point? Growing up, people never took to me. Teachers said I was sullen. My grandfather raised me, and he was always telling me not to look at him like that, not to look at my grandmother like that. There was just something about me, two shades off. I had to learn how to hide it, but my son? Dean? He was born smiling. People would take one look at him and they’d smile, too. Everybody loved that boy. My boy.
Briggs: Did you? Love him?
Redding: I made him. He was mine, and if it was in him to charm, to put people at ease, it was in me.
Briggs: Your son taught you how to blend in, how to be liked, how to be trusted. What did you teach your son?
Redding: Why don’t you ask your wife? Pretty little thing, isn’t she? But the mouth on that one…mmmm, mmm, mmmmm.
“Good reading?”
A voice snapped me back to the present. “Lia.”
“You just can’t help yourself, can you?” There was an edge to Lia’s voice, but she didn’t sound as blindly furious with me as she had before.
“I’m sorry about earlier.” I took my life in my own hands and risked apologizing, knowing it might set her off. “You’re right. I don’t know what Dean’s going through. The situation with Locke and me—it wasn’t the same.”
“Always so genuine,” Lia said, a hint of sharpness to her singsong tone. “Always willing to own up to her mistakes.” Her gaze locked on to the binder in my lap, and her voice went flat. “Yet always so very ready to make the same mistakes, all over again.”
“Lia,” I said. “I’m not trying to get between the two of you—”
“God, Cassie. I told you this wasn’t about you. Do you really think it’s about me?”
I wasn’t sure what to think. Lia went out of her way to be difficult to profile. The one thing I was sure of was her loyalty to Dean.
“He wouldn’t want you reading those.” She sounded certain—but then again, Lia always sounded certain.
“I thought it might help,” I said. “If I understood, then I could—”
“Help?” Lia repeated, biting out the word. “That’s the problem with you, Cassie. Your intentions are always so good. You always just want to help. But at the end of the day, you don’t help. Someone gets hurt, and that someone is never you.”
“I’m not going to hurt Dean,” I said vehemently.