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I am not surprised to find Dragonfly empty—Trevor and Olena surely won’t be out here tonight. Tonight it belongs to me.

This time I don’t go upstairs. I sit against the wall on the ground floor, letting my eyes drift around the space. There is a faint pale splotch high up on the wall, where a trophy might have been hung, long since cleared away; no beast from my nightmares will loom out of the darkness tonight.

Connor brought me here. To a place completely controlled by his family—people who will do anything to protect their secrets. I am cut off here, isolated. He’s never asked about my past before, but now it’s all he seems to want to talk about. Who I am. Where I came from.

What I remember.

I think of the way he set that photo down, turning the conversation on me. He wanted a confession, but is that the confession he wanted?

Surely he didn’t know.

Surely we just happened to meet. We just happened to fall in love, and he just happened to bring me here, and I just happen to be the little girl holding his father’s hand in the snow.

Liam Dalton, the antlered man. His face is no longer indistinct in my mind. I can see it, looming above me. Half-light, half-dark, the way it is in my dream. They covered up his affair. What else did he do that no one can be allowed to know about?

I can see myself approaching the car. I can see those feet sticking out from behind the door. But I don’t want to go forward. I don’t want to see what’s waiting for that little girl.

Run , I think. And I did run, didn’t I? Cold air stinging my throat. I ran and I hid, but he found me. A hand around my wrist. A scream. Dragging me out, away from this place of safety. I’ve risen to my feet without realizing it.

Come with me , Liam Dalton says, and so I do. I walk to the door and stand there in the dark, the snow silvery before me, and I can almost see the shape of two figures—one large, one small—lurching away.

I follow the ghost of Liam Dalton into the woods.

“Keep up,” Liam snaps. He keeps a hard grip around her wrist, and she tries to keep up, she does, but her legs are too short. Every few steps he yanks her along, a rough jerk that makes her shoulder ache. She doesn’t know where they’re going. She’s never been this way before. “Goddamn it,” he growls.

“Where’s Mama?” she asks, plaintive.

He doesn’t answer.

Something moves among the trees, scaring loose a shower of snow and startling me from my recollection.

That girl—she isn’t Dora Scott. She isn’t Theo, either. Like me, she doesn’t have a name. And without a name, she’s no one.

Who are you? I ask her silently. Who am I?

But of course no answer comes.

There’s a light among the trees, coming toward me. I’m not surprised to recognize Mr. Vance’s sturdy build or the inky shadow trotting alongside him. Duchess comes straight over to me and inserts her muzzle into my gloved hand. I might not be a dog person, but I know how to follow orders. I scratch her below the chin and she gives a water buffalo grunt of appreciation.

“She’s decided she likes you,” Mr. Vance observes. “You’re out late.”

“I brought a flashlight this time,” I say helpfully.

“All the same. Probably best you head back to your cabin,” he replies.

I look over my shoulder. I’m not even certain which way I came from. Where I am. I find myself searching the shadows for two sets of tracks—one large, one small.

“You don’t want to go back,” Mr. Vance says. Duchess’s dark eyes watch me, like she’s waiting for my answer. I crouch down, roughing the fur behind her ears, buying myself a few seconds to answer. She looks at Vance and huffs. He scratches the tip of his nose thoughtfully. “Tell you what. Why don’t you come on by my place? I can make you a cup of coffee and get you back when you’re ready.”

“That’s not necessary,” I say. “I’m fine.”

“I wouldn’t feel right leaving a young lady out here alone,” Mr. Vance says, and I suddenly wonder if there was another woman he extended his concern to. He’s been working for the Daltons for decades. He must have been here when she was.

“Okay,” I say, with the slightest nod. Mr. Vance clicks his tongue, and Duchess trots over to him.

“It’s not far,” he says.

His definition and mine might be different. He brings us on a route between the pines, our flashlights making shadows gyre around us, and then to a road—rougher than the one we took up here, only wide enough for a single vehicle.

“I didn’t realize there was another road up here,” I say.

“Not much of one. It’s the long way around, and there’s not much reason to use it,” Mr. Vance says. “It’s more to get at the trails around the other side of the mountain, but it will take you down to Datura if you follow it far enough.”

We walk for a good quarter mile, and here a small cabin comes into view, three vehicles parked in front of it—a Jeep, a four-wheeler, and a Sno-Cat. The heavy-duty option for getting down the mountain in the snow.

Vance unlocks the door and ushers me inside, where I’m immediately hit with the stultifying warmth of a woodstove. The snow melts rapidly from Duchess’s flanks as she shoulders past me, and she leaves perfect damp paw prints as she walks over to the stove, stretches mightily, and flumps down with a contented groan.

Vance chuckles. “Feel free to make yourself comfortable, but I’m afraid Duchess has the best seat in the house,” he says.

It’s not much of a house and the seating is limited. There’s a bed shoved up against one corner and a single armchair, seams worn through and stuffing poking out of the holes. A tiny kitchen table and a pair of chipped white chairs are the only other option. There’s no kitchen, not even a fridge. The only light comes from oil lamps hung on the walls. No electricity either, then. Vance grabs a pot from a cupboard and steps outside. When he returns, the pot is full of snow; he sets it on the stove. I ease myself into the armchair. It creaks under me.

“You live here?” I ask.

“Only during this particular stretch, and now and again when I’m too bushed to make it down the mountain,” he says. “Magnus likes me to be on hand during the winter, particularly if there’s snow like this, though that isn’t often—it’s usually later in the winter it starts getting this bad.”

“Are you from the area?”

“I grew up in Datura,” Vance says. He collects one of the chairs from the “kitchen” and brings it over, settling into it with a sigh. “Wandered away for a few years, but I never found anything worth sticking around for anywhere else. What about you?”

I can’t tell exactly what he’s asking. “I haven’t been many places,” I say. “But I haven’t found one I’ve cared to stay in, either.”

“Not a big traveler?”

“That takes money,” I tell him.

“That handsome boy of yours doesn’t take you on fancy trips?” Mr. Vance’s eyebrows raise.

“He tried to take me to Paris for our two-month anniversary, but I didn’t have a passport,” I admit. Instead he’d taken me to the desert, where the sun baked the earth and made the air shimmer, and he slid an ice cube along the inside of my elbow to keep me cool. I had never seen a sky that full of stars. We stayed in an enormous house made of white stone with a pool that ran the whole length of it, and I didn’t see another human being for eight days.

I’ve had a rapid education in how people—including me—react to the level of wealth that Connor and the Daltons represent. There are the fawners, the sneerers, the stammerers. My own reaction has been something akin to relief. Like a fist around my throat has eased off for the first time. Maybe money can’t buy happiness, but it buys peace of mind. Security. Safety.

Comfort. Pleasure. The sure knowledge that I’ll never have to live in a place like the room I’m sitting in now.

Mr. Vance, for his part, seems utterly untroubled one way or another by the vast resources commanded by his employer—unbothered by the fact that he’s sleeping in this cabin while the Daltons rest in comfort up the road. He stands up to check on the progress of the water now steaming on the stove.

“You’ve worked for the Daltons for a very long time,” I remark.

“Thirty years or so,” Mr. Vance acknowledges.

“Then you were here…” I swallow. “You mentioned being here when Liam Dalton died. Connor’s father.” As if I have to specify.

Mr. Vance scratches his chin. His beard rasps under his dirt-packed nails. Their tips are yellowed, and the smell of tobacco clings thickly to him. “Like I said, I wasn’t actually here when it happened. Might have been able to do something if I had been.” His voice is tinged with regret.

“What exactly happened?” I ask. “I thought from what you said that the damage was to Dragonfly, but T—someone said it was the main lodge.”

“Oh. Yeah, that’s right. Guess I can see how you got that impression. No, Dragonfly was just…” He trails off, and for the first time since I encountered him in the woods hunting that deer, he looks nervous.

“He had a woman living there,” I say. Letting him know he doesn’t have to break that confidence. He visibly relaxes.

“That’s right. Mallory Cahill. Sweet woman.”

Cahill. I have a last name now. “You knew her.”

“Sure. You can hide from just about anyone up here, but not me,” he says. “Mr. Dalton—Liam, that is—let me know that someone would be staying here and that I wasn’t to ask questions or tell anyone about it, including his family. I can’t say it was something I was comfortable with, but, well…” He shifts.

“He paid you,” I guess.

“I didn’t see how it would cause any harm. The lodge was locked up tight, and there wasn’t anything in the cabins worth stealing. I saw her now and again, just to check if she needed anything. Her and the girl.”

“So you met her daughter, too?” I ask. My mouth is dry and my heart is pounding.

“Sure. Cute kid,” he says. “Of course, any kid’s cute at that age. She could talk your ear off. About everything. I had a big old hound back then—Bishop. She was scared to death of him, but if I came up on my own, she’d follow me around while I was working, making me tell her what every plant and bird was. Wouldn’t accept that I didn’t always know, either, so sometimes I had to make things up.” He chuckles.

I was the little girl with a vocabulary you could track on one hand for almost the first year I was with the Scotts. Moody. Wouldn’t go near anyone I didn’t know, and not even the ones I did. Sometime after, that insatiable curiosity appeared—the need to know things, collect names and meanings. I thought it was a consequence of not knowing my own name. The peculiar shape my scar tissue took. But it was part of me all along.

“What happened to them?” I ask. “Mallory and the girl.”

The water has started to boil. He hauls himself to his feet again and gets out a coffee maker, spooning out grounds from a giant container of Folgers. “They were gone by the time I got up here to help with Mr. Dalton. The body, I mean.”

He’s lying , I think. I don’t know what about, but the way he won’t look at me, the way his eyes fix on his task and his normally steady hand shakes—there’s something he’s hiding from me.

“I suppose,” I say delicately, “that she wouldn’t have wanted to stick around after that. It might lead to awkward questions. About why she was here.”

“I try not to judge,” he says uncomfortably. The coffee is done. He takes down two mugs, blowing dust off one before he fills them both halfway with coffee that smells like it may melt my molars. He carries them over, hands one to me before taking a seat. He adjusts the mug in his hands, fidgety. “She was a sweet woman. A real sweet woman.”

“Mr. Vance,” I say. Hesitate. He looks at me, expectant. I blow ripples across the surface of my coffee to buy myself time. “Is there any chance—is it possible there was something more going on that day? The day that Liam died, I mean.”

“What exactly are you asking?” he asks, sitting up straight.

“Honestly, I’m not sure,” I say. I don’t know how to explain this without explaining too much.

“I know it was a tragedy,” Vance says. “A terrible thing.”

“And you’re sure you have no idea where Mallory and her daughter went?” I ask.

“She took off without a word. And in a hurry,” Vance says. “Can’t blame her for not sticking around.”

“Did she leave anything?” I ask. “Something that might give any hint—”

His face clouds with suspicion. “Why are you so interested?”

“I don’t know,” I say. I have no good explanation. “I just… I’m just curious. I’ve always been curious. One of my faults.”

He grips the mug, but he hasn’t taken a sip in a long time. “You know,” he says slowly, “I kept a few of her things. In case the girl—in case they came back for them.”

My heart gives a hard thump in my chest. “Are they here? Can I…?”

There’s another beat, his eyes dark and bright. And then he stands. He goes to the wardrobe that sits against one wall and opens the bottom drawer. He pulls out a plastic bag—just a grocery bag, gone thin as tissue paper from age. He carries it over and hands it to me without ceremony.

At the top of the bag is something large and soft. I lift the bear out gingerly. Its fur is slightly dingy, its black eyes dulled.

I blink. There are tears in my eyes, but I don’t dare wipe them away; Vance will see.

“It was her favorite,” Vance says. I can’t look at him. I focus all my will on keeping my breathing steady. “The little girl.”

“I don’t even know her name,” I say.

“Her mother called her Teddy,” Vance says, and I nod. It has to be enough, I suppose. “But her real name was Rowan.”

The breath goes out of me, and I can’t get it back. Rowan. The name is like a blow to my chest. I know that name. I know it. She called me Teddy when she was happy and laughing, when she was sad and brushing the hair away from my face, but Rowan—

Rowan, run.

She called me Rowan the day she was afraid.

My hands are gripping the teddy bear tight.

“Why don’t you hold on to that?” Vance says quietly. “Don’t know why I’ve bothered to keep it all this time. Guess I was still hoping she’d come back for it someday. But she’d be all grown up now, of course.” I can’t read his expression. There’s something hard in his eyes. Something grim.

I turn my attention back to the bag to break eye contact. I draw out a rich blue scarf. It smells musty, like the bear, but it’s still soft.

Blue. It was blue , I think, but still something in my memory rebels.

There’s one more thing in the bag. It’s a framed photograph, facing down. I pick it up gingerly, turn it over, and there she is. Smiling, a little girl’s face pressed up next to hers. The woman in the photo has freckles over her nose and a birthmark right at the corner of her left eye. Her eyes are brown and so is her hair, a honeyed brown that falls in soft waves around her long face. A face that holds traces of my own—the large eyes, the prominent cheekbones, the way it’s not pretty, not exactly, but it catches your eye and holds it.

“She was a lovely woman,” Vance says, and I know he’s not talking about her looks.

I stare at the photo and don’t answer. I’ve seen this woman before.

Not in my memory. In a photograph—several, actually.

The photographs hidden in Alexis’s suitcase.