“Don’t say a word,” Agent Sterling told me under her breath. “I’ll take care of this.”

The guard walked us down a hallway. Agent Sterling whipped out her phone.

“I can put you in the visitor’s room,” the guard offered. “Or you can wait in the offices out front.”

Whoever Sterling was calling didn’t answer. She turned her attention to the guard. “Mr….” She trailed off, waiting for him to provide his last name.

“Webber,” he said.

“Mr. Webber, there is a reason you and your colleague were asked to meet Agent Briggs at the back door. There is a reason that Agent Briggs is not meeting with Daniel Redding in the visitor’s room. This case is sensitive and need-to-know. And no one needs to know that the FBI has been here to see Redding.”

Prison guards held a position of power inside these walls, and this one relished his. Webber didn’t like being reminded that Sterling was FBI. He didn’t like her. He didn’t like being talked down to.

And he really didn’t like Dean. Or Redding. Or me.

This was not going to end well.

“Unless you have somewhere we can wait that is both secured and private,” Agent Sterling continued, “I suggest you call your supervisor and—”

“Secured and private?” the guard said, congenial and polite enough to send chills down my spine. “Why didn’t you say so?”

We ended up in an observation room. On the other side of a two-way mirror, Agent Briggs and Dean sat across from a man with dark hair and dark eyes.

Dean’s eyes.

I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be seeing this.

But thanks to a prison guard with a chip on his shoulder, I was. Dean and his father sat in silence, and I couldn’t keep from wondering: how long had they been sitting there, staring at each other? What had we missed?

Beside me, Sterling’s eyes were locked on Redding.

Dean’s father wasn’t a big man, but sitting there, a slight smile gracing even and unremarkable features, he commanded attention. His dark hair was thick and neat. There was a slight trace of stubble on his chin and cheeks.

“Tell me about the letters.” Dean didn’t phrase those words as a question or as a request. Whatever conversation had passed between the two of them before we’d gotten here, Dean was a man on a mission now.

Get the information he needed and get out.

“Which letters?” his father asked amiably. “The ones that curse me to hell and back? The ones from the families, describing their journeys toward forgiveness? The ones from women proposing marriage?”

“The ones from the professor,” Dean countered. “The one who’s writing the book.”

“Ah,” Redding said. “Fogle, I believe it was? Healthy mop of hair, deep, soulful eyes, overly fond of Nietzsche?”

“So he’s been to visit.” Dean wasn’t affected by his father’s theatrics. “What did he ask you?”

“There are only two questions, Dean. You know that.” Redding smiled fondly. “Why and how.”

“And what kind of person was the professor?” Dean pressed. “Was he more interested in the why or the how?”

“Little of column A, little of column B.” Redding leaned forward. “Why the sudden interest in my professorial colleague? Afraid he might not get your part right when he tells our story?”

“We don’t have a story.”

“My story is your story.” An odd light came into Redding’s eyes, but he managed to tamp down on it and dial the intensity in his voice back a notch. “If you want to know what the professor was writing and what he’s capable of, I suggest you ask him yourself.”

“I will,” Dean said. “As soon as you tell me where to find him.”

“For heaven’s sake, Dean, I don’t have the man on speed dial. We aren’t friends. He interviewed me a few times. Generally, he asked the questions and I answered them, not the other way around.”

Dean stood to leave.

“But,” Redding added coyly, “he did mention that he does most of his writing in a cabin in the mountains.”

“What cabin?” Dean asked. “What mountains?”

Redding gestured with his manacled hands toward Dean’s seat. After a long moment, Dean sat.

“My memory may need some refreshing,” Redding said, leaning forward slightly, his eyes making a careful study of Dean’s.

“What do you want?” Dean’s voice was completely flat. Redding either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

“You,” the man said, his eyes roving over Dean, drinking in every detail, like an artist surveying his finest work. “I want to know about you, Dean. What have those hands been doing the past five years? What sights have those eyes seen?”

There was something disconcerting about listening to Dean’s father break his body down into parts.

Dean is just a thing to you, I thought. He’s hands and eyes, a mouth. Something to be molded. Something to own.

“I didn’t come here to talk about me.” Dean’s voice never wavered.

His father shrugged. “And I can’t seem to remember if the professor’s cabin was near Catoctin or Shenandoah.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.” Dean’s eyes bore into his father’s. “There’s nothing to talk about. Is that what you want to hear? That these hands, these eyes—they’re nothing?”

“They’re everything,” Redding replied, his voice vibrating with intensity. “And there is so much more you could do.”

Beside me, Agent Sterling stood. She took a step closer to the glass. Closer to Redding.

“Come now, Dean-o, there must be something worth talking about in your life.” Redding was perfectly at ease, immune—maybe even unaware—of the enmity rolling off Dean. “Music. Sports. A motorcycle. A girl.” Redding cocked his head to the side. “Ah,” he said. “So there is a girl.”

“There’s no one,” Dean bit out.

“Methinks you doth protest too much, son.”

“I am not your son.”

Redding’s hands shot out. In a flash, he was on his feet. Dean must have been leaning forward, because somehow, Redding managed to get hold of his shirt. Father jerked son to his feet. “You are my son, more than you were ever your whore mother’s. I’m in you, boy. In your blood, in your mind, in every breath you take.” Redding’s face was close to Dean’s now, close enough that Dean would have felt the heat from his breath with each word. “You know it. You fear it.”

One second Dean was just standing there, and the next, his hands were fisted in his father’s orange jumpsuit, and Daniel Redding was being pulled bodily across the table.

“Hey!” Briggs came between the two of them. Redding let go of Dean first. He held his hands up in submission.

You never really submit, I thought. You never give in. You get what you want—and you want Dean.

Agent Sterling’s hand clamped around my elbow. “We’re going,” she told me. The guard tried to stop her, but she turned the full force of her glare on him. “One more word, one more step, and I swear to God, I will have your job.”

I looked back at Dean. Briggs put a hand on his chest and pushed, hard. Like a sleepwalker suddenly awakened, Dean jerked backward, dropping his hold on his father. He looked at the two-way mirror, and I would have sworn that he could see me standing there.

“Cassandra,” Agent Sterling snapped. “We’re going. Now.”

The last thing I heard before I left was Dean’s voice, empty and hard. “Tell me about the professor’s cabin.”

“This was a mistake.” Sterling waited until the two of us were ensconced in the car before saying those words.

“Going with the guard?” I asked.

“Bringing you here. Bringing Dean here. Staying in that room, watching that. All of it.” When Sterling said all of it, I got the sense that she wasn’t just talking about the way that Briggs and the director had chosen to handle this case. She meant the life Dean was living. The Naturals program. All of it.