“Yes? And?”
“You didn’t catch it.”
“Catch what?”
“The lie.” I got a light untethered feeling in my chest. “He lied to your face and you didn’t catch it.” And then I remembered. “I lied too.”
His forehead wrinkled. “You did?”
“Yes, earlier, when I made the joke about my shocking past. You didn’t catch it. It’s been happening a lot.”
“It has?”
“Yes! I just thought you were deciding not to call me on it. I mean, nothing serious, just jokes really, but still…”
Now he was really confused. “What? When? I—”
“Look at me.” I blanked my expression, which never worked, not on Trey. “I have seven dollars in my wallet. True or false?”
He watched my mouth the entire time I spoke. Lies lay heavy on the mouth, I’d discovered. I could make my eyes sparkle as needed, my mannerisms as smoothly deceptive as required, but my mouth always gave me away.
He blinked at me. “Say it again.”
I did. He shook his head, but didn’t say anything.
I got lightheaded. “My wallet is empty, Trey. Utterly empty.”
“Oh.” He frowned, nodded slowly. “Okay.”
“Okay? I just told you—”
“I know what you told me.” He got to his feet, but didn’t start pacing. He simply stood there, eyes cast to the side, arms folded. Seemingly calm, except that his respiration was becoming shallow. “I’ve always told you I wasn’t infallible.”
“This is different. You’ve been off your game with everyone.”
“It’s not a game. It’s not on or off. It’s…not that.”
“And not just me. Finn—”
“I’ve never been able to read Finn.”
“No, but we assumed she was an aberration. What if she’s not? What if you haven’t been able to read any of them?”
He still wouldn’t look at me. “I don’t know.”
“We’re here because you looked Nick Talbot in the eye and said he wasn’t a murderer.”
“He’s not.”
“You don’t know that!”
I saw the first flare of panic in his eyes. He smothered it as I watched, replaced it with the cold impenetrable withdrawal. I could feel the invisible wall coming up between us, and when I reached for his hand, he snatched away as my fingers brushed his wrist.
He ran both hands through his hair, let them rest on the back of his neck. “I’m very tired. I can’t think clearly. I need to get some rest and then we’ll reevaluate.”
“Trey—”
“Not now. I can’t. I need to rest. Can you take the cameras until Jonathon returns?” He gestured toward the bank of video monitors. “Two hours. I only need two hours.”
He needed more, much more, but he’d have what I could get him.
“Of course,” I said.
Trey closed the door behind himself, and I sat down at the array. Jonathon had brewed up coffee—strong and sweet, his secret to the night shift, he said—and I poured a cup. Wished I’d had whiskey to put in it. Wished I still had Nick’s half-smoked cigarette.
I could see his cabin on one of the screens, guarded now by the woman who’d pretended to be the bartender. No more pretense from her, although everybody else was still spinning webs of deceit. We thought we’d been cleaning house of such, but we hadn’t. That had been a pretense too.
I leaned back in the chair. Our entire justification for taking the case—that Nick was telling the truth when he said that he hadn’t killed his wife—could be wrong. We’d been trying to keep a murderer out, and chances were good that a murderer was penned up with us. All the people we’d cleared of this misdeed or that—Nick, Addison, Portia, Quint—were suddenly suspicious again.
The resort lay quiet and still around us. A deer picked its way along the perimeter, a big eight-point buck. It wasn’t yet the rutting season, so it was calm, interested in feeding not fighting. The wrangler had found the other animals and corralled them for the night, far away from the reeking barn.
Eventually Jonathon returned and took over the monitoring duties. I stepped into the night and called my brother. “I know it’s two a.m., but it’s kind of an emergency,” I said.
“What’s happened?”
I told him. Clouds had moved in, and now the moon shone behind a gauzy veil. Eric listened while I explained.
“Are you sure?” he finally said. “He really can’t tell?”
“I’m sure.”
Eric’s voice vibrated with excitement. “This is amazing, exactly what I hypothesized!” I could hear him rummaging through paperwork. “The research has been clear, that this particular ability is linked to verbal expression, or the lack thereof, to be exact. Aphasia. Which Trey had, right after the accident. But since then, he’s recovered much of his verbal ability. I know you’ve noticed.”
I had. Over the year and a half that I’d known him, he’d grown quicker with words, more expansive in his vocabulary. He still hadn’t lost the clipped cadence or the monotone delivery. But his sentences were more fluid now, often laced with a dry sense of humor, deft and self-aware.
“But what does that have to do with whether or not he can detect lies?”
“Nobody knows. Researchers have noticed the correlation, but that’s as far as science has gotten.” He paused. “I know this puts you in a challenging situation now—”
“No kidding.”
“—but it’s a good thing, really. It’s healing. It’s progress. And he’s worked hard for it.”
“Yes, but—”
“I know, I know. He’s gotten used to being able to judge people pretty instantly. He’s going to have to use his instincts now, just like the rest of us. But it means he’s got a filter now. It means he’s capable of interacting with people and environments, even stimuli-rich ones, without shutting down.” Another pause. “You’re responsible for that, you know.”
“Me?”
“Yes. He’s adapting to being with you. You totally overwhelmed him at first, but he persevered. Because you matter.” A hesitation. “Because he loves you.”
I remembered everything at once. Trey tending my wounds. Trey with the list of why he was with me. Trey handing me the keys to the Ferrari even though his heart had been thrashing around in terror.
My voice cracked. “Why me?”
“I
