She just hadn’t needed one in a very long time.

“Dean will get over it.” I said that instead of the other things I was thinking—about exit strategies and Lia’s childhood and the way that she had, in all likelihood, learned to lie. “He can’t stay mad at us forever,” I continued. “We were just trying to help.”

“Don’t you get it?” Lia finally turned her head toward mine, her dark eyes gleaming with tears she would never let herself shed. “Dean doesn’t get mad. He doesn’t let himself. So if we went to talk to him right now, he wouldn’t be angry with us. He wouldn’t be anything. That’s what he does. He shuts down, and he shuts people out, and that’s fine. I get it. Of all people, I do.” Lia closed her eyes and clamped her lips together. She took several ragged breaths and then opened them again. “But he doesn’t shut me out.”

Dean knew Lia better than any of us, and that meant that he knew exactly what shutting her out would do. He knew that he was the one person she trusted, that their relationship was the one thing that kept her from feeling trapped all the time. Michael’s defense mechanism growing up had been to recognize anger, and if he couldn’t defuse it, to provoke it. Lia’s had been to bury herself away under so many layers of deception that whatever anyone else did to her, they couldn’t really hurt her, because they couldn’t touch the real girl.

Dean was the exception.

“When I came here, it was just Dean and Judd and me.” Lia abandoned her spoon in the carton and leaned back on the heels of her hands. I wasn’t sure why she was telling me this, but for once, I knew in my gut that everything she was telling me was true. “I was ready to hate him. I’m good at hating people, but Dean never pressed. He never asked me a single question that I didn’t want to answer. One night after I’d been here a couple of months, I went to sneak out. Running away is something I’m good at.”

I filed that away under the growing list of things I knew about Lia’s past.

“Dean caught me. He said that if I was going, he was going with me. I called his bluff, but it turned out, he wasn’t bluffing. I ran away. He followed. We were gone for three days. I’d lived on the streets before, but he hadn’t. He stayed up nights so I could sleep. Sometimes I’d wake up and I’d see him keeping watch. He never looked at me the way most guys look at me. He was watching out for me, not watching me.” She paused. “He never asked for a thing in return.”

“He wouldn’t.”

Lia’s smile was brittle. “No,” she agreed. “He wouldn’t. The last day before we came back, he told me about his dad, about how he’d come to be here, about Briggs. Dean is the only person I’ve ever known who’s never lied to me.”

And now he wasn’t talking to her at all.

“Agent Sterling was one of his father’s victims,” I said softly. Lia’s eyes flew to mine. From the sharp intake of breath that followed, I knew that she’d recognized my words as the truth and didn’t know how to handle it.

Telling Lia didn’t feel like betraying Dean. She was his family. She’d opened up to me in a way that Lia didn’t open up to people, and that told me how badly she needed to know that he wasn’t shutting her out just because she’d screwed up. Dean’s life was a minefield right now.

“Sterling has a brand, right here.” I held my fingertips to my chest. “She got away somehow. I think Dean helped her escape.”

Lia digested that information, her face unreadable. “And now, she’s back,” she said finally, her eyes fixed on a place in the distance. “And all Dean can think is that he didn’t help her enough.”

I nodded. “Then Emerson Cole turns up dead, and Dean ends up in an interrogation room with his father.” I leaned back, allowing my head to clunk lightly against the side of the house. “Going into that room, listening to what Daniel Redding had to say, that’s what made Dean shut down. It was like someone had drained his soul from his body. Then Agent Sterling lets him know that we went digging on our own—”

“Which you let slip,” Lia interjected.

“Sterling already knew that I’d snuck out,” I told her. “And besides, I didn’t tell her what we did. I didn’t even tell her you were there. I just told her what we learned.”

“None of which even matters,” Lia cut in, “because every student in that class—not to mention the TA—has an ironclad alibi. And instead of using us, the way they should, the FBI, in all their glorious wisdom, leaves us locked up here, where we can’t do anything to solve the case or to help Dean.” Lia wound a thick strand of jet-black hair around her finger. “And here’s our favorite person now.”

I followed Lia’s gaze. A dark car had pulled into the driveway. Agent Sterling got out.

“Where do you suppose she’s been?” Lia asked me.

Sterling had stopped by the house earlier, just long enough to pick up the students’ files, then she’d left. I’d assumed she’d gone back to meet Briggs, but he wasn’t with her now.

The passenger side of Sterling’s car opened, and the director climbed out. The two of them had the look of people who had just endured a very tense, very silent car ride.

“Think he’s back to see us?” I asked, lowering my voice, even though they were far enough away that I wasn’t sure I needed to.

Lia clapped a hand over my mouth and pulled me back so that we were partially obscured from view. Her eyes narrowed. I nodded, to show that I understood, and a moment later, I discovered why Lia was so fond of the roof.

The acoustics were excellent.

“You’re welcome to borrow the car to see yourself home,” Agent Sterling said. She was using her interrogator’s voice, implacable and even-keeled.

“I asked you to drive me here,” the director returned. His voice was baritone, just as unruffled as hers. “I’d like to talk to the boy.”

“You don’t need to talk to Dean.”

“I think you’re forgetting which one of us is the director here, Agent.”

“And I think you’re forgetting that after the Locke debacle, I wasn’t the only one asking questions.” She paused, waiting for those words to hit their target. “I have contacts at National Intelligence. People in Washington are talking. What do you think would happen if it got out that the FBI was consulting with Redding’s teenage son on this case?”

“This is the one case for which exposure isn’t a concern.” The director’s tone never changed. “The FBI would be talking to the boy on this case whether he was working for us or not. If the director of National Intelligence asks—and he won’t—it would be easy enough to explain. Redding’s son was there the first time around. He knows the ins and outs of Redding’s psyche better than anyone—including you.”

“I agreed to come here and evaluate this program because you said that reporting the Naturals program to Washington would be a mistake.” A tiny hint of emotion crept into Agent Sterling’s voice, though whether it was frustration or something else, I couldn’t tell. “You told me that I needed to see it myself to understand exactly what I would be shutting down.”

I’d wondered why the director would send his daughter here, knowing she thought this program was a mistake, and now I knew.

“You listened to me then,” the director countered calmly. “You could have filed that report, and you didn’t.”

“Like you left me any choice!”

“I did nothing but tell you the truth.” The director looked down at his watch, as if to mark exactly how much time he was wasting on this conversation. “This program is the only thing keeping that boy from the edge. You think he’d fare better in foster care? Or maybe you’d like me to send Lia Zhang back onto the streets? She’d get caught again eventually, and this time, I guarantee you she’d end up getting tried as an adult.”

I felt Lia stiffen beside me.

“You wanted me to come here,” Sterling said, gritting out the words. “I came here. But when I did, you promised that you would listen to my recommendations.”