“This isn’t the first time this has happened, you know.”

I glanced up at Dad. Earlier, I’d begged him not to call my stepmom. He acquiesced reluctantly, swearing he’d have hell to pay when he got home. Somehow I doubted it.

“In the apartment building where you live now,” he said, standing beside me, “this exact same thing happened. You were little.”

Dad was fishing for information. He’d long suspected something had happened to me that night. He was lead detective on the case of the paroled child molester’s bizarre attack. After more than twenty years, he was putting it all together. He was right. This wasn’t the first time, or the second. It would seem Reyes Farrow had been my guardian angel for quite some time.

Unable to piece together the whys and wherefores, I decided not to think about it and focused on two things that were not Reyes related: drinking my hot chocolate and steadying my shaking hands.

“A man’s spinal cord was severed in two with absolutely no external injury to the surrounding area. No extraneous bruising. No trauma whatsoever. And you were there both times.”

He was fishing again, waiting for me to give up what I knew, what he suspected. I guess I’d changed that day, become a little withdrawn, even for a four-year-old. But why should I tell him now? It would only cause him pain. He didn’t need to know every detail of my life. And there were some things that, even at twenty-seven, were impossible to tell your father. I don’t think I could have gotten the words out if I’d tried.

I placed a hand in his and squeezed. “I wasn’t there, Dad. Not that day,” I said, lying through my teeth.

He turned away from me and closed his eyes. He wanted to know, but like I’d told Cookie, it wasn’t always better knowing.

“That was the same guy from the other night? The one who hit you?” Uncle Bob asked.

After lowering my cup, I answered, “Yes. He was trying to pick me up, I said no, he got hostile, and the rest is history.” I wasn’t about to tell them the truth. Doing so would risk Rosie’s freedom.

“I say we all go to the station and talk about this,” Uncle Bob said.

Dad flashed him a warning glare, and my muscles tensed. When those two fought, it wasn’t pretty. A little humorous, perhaps, but I doubted anyone was in the mood to laugh. Besides me. Laughing was like Jell-O. There was always room for Jell-O.

“Great, I’d like to get out of the cold, anyway,” I said, narrowly averting World War III.

“You can ride with me,” Uncle Bob said after a moment. What did Dad expect him to do? He knew the rules. We’d have to go to the station eventually anyway. May as well get it over with.

Then Uncle Bob looked over at Garrett. “You can ride with me as well.”

Dad looked at him in surprise then gratitude when Uncle Bob winked at him. As Dad walked me to Uncle Bob’s SUV, he leaned down and whispered, “You two have to get your stories straight on the way. In your statement, just say that when you opened the door, there were two men there. They were fighting, the gun went off, and the other guy fled down the fire escape.”

He patted my back and offered me a reassuring smile before closing the door. A haze of worry surrounded him, and I suddenly felt guilty for all the things I’d put him through growing up. He’d carried a lot for me. Made up excuses, found ways to put men behind bars without involving me directly, and now he had to trust in Uncle Bob to do the same thing.

“How did you do that?” Garrett asked before Ubie got into the car. “That guy must have weighed over two hundred pounds.”

We were both sitting in the backseat. “I didn’t.”

He stared at me hard, trying to understand. “One of your dead guys?”

“No,” I said, watching Dad and Uncle Bob talk. They seemed okay. “No, this was something else.”

I heard Garrett lean back in his seat, scrub his face with his fingers. “So, there’s more than just dead people walking around? Like what? Demons? Poltergeists?”

“Poltergeists are just pissed-off dead people. It’s really not that mysterious,” I said. But I was lying. Reyes was about as mysterious as it got.

It didn’t matter what I did, I could not stop thinking about him. I wondered about his tattoos, trying to unearth their meaning from the jumble of chaos in my mind. If only I didn’t have so many useless facts floating around in there. Damn my pursuit of trivia.

I wondered other things as well. Was he carbon based? Was he really thirty years old or thirty billion? Was he an innie or an outie? I knew enough not to question his planetary origins. He wasn’t extraterrestrial. The fourth dimension, the other side, didn’t work that way. There were no planets or countries or landmarks to distinguish its borders. It spanned the universe and beyond. It simply was. Everywhere at once. Like God, I figured.

“Okay,” Uncle Bob said after buckling his seat belt. “I have to think really hard on the way to the station. I probably won’t hear a thing you guys say to each other.” He glanced at me from the rearview mirror and winked again.

By the time we arrived at the station, there had miraculously been two men in the hallway when I opened the door. The other man had dirty blond hair and a beard, nondescript dark clothes, and no distinguishing marks, making him almost impossible to identify. Darn it. Frankly, I was a little surprised Garrett was going along with it.

“Like I want to be locked in a padded cell,” he said as we strolled inside the station. He was beginning to see my side of it, why I never told people what I was.