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Dad was quiet for a moment.

Mom’s fingers tightened around mine. I squeezed back.

She hadn’t let go for long since we got here. I didn’t ask her to.

Dad leaned forward, forearms on his knees. “We know where you came out. We know where the teams were when they spotted you. That gives us one point.”

I looked away. Trees. Running. Max. Red twine.

Nothing that made a map.

Dad continued carefully. “You could’ve covered miles. You could’ve doubled back. Crossed your own trail. Followed water. Cut sideways. We don’t know.”

“I did all of those things,” I admitted. “I don’t even know how many times or where.”

“We know,” he told me. “The dogs had pieces of your trail,” he added. “Then you hit water and crossed your own trail enough times that it stopped being useful.”

Declan’s hand closed around mine. I looked at him. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.

Max had been there. I knew that. Someone had put him there.

I knew that too.

But somewhere between the porch and the lights, there were hours of woods I couldn’t account for.

And somewhere inside those hours was Max.

I had no idea how to find him again.

There were rules about who could follow you into hospital rooms.

Apparently none of them applied to Declan Bishop.

Nobody had ever formally decided that. It had just become family law when I was nine.

I had come home breathing, eating when somebody put food in front of me, sleeping when exhaustion won, but otherwise so far inside myself that nobody could reach me. Doctors tried. Therapists tried. Dad and Mom tried until I thought, looking back on it, that it must have nearly killed them.

Then Declan tried.

And I came back.

That was how my parents remembered it. How Riot and Marion remembered it too. Not as coincidence. Not as one child reaching another at the right moment.

Declan had brought me back.

That belief had survived nearly a decade without anybody questioning it. If something was off about me, he was the first one they looked to. Friday night had made it worse.

If I asked for him, doors opened. Hospital rooms. Police statements. Medical exams that probably should have had considerably fewer eighteen-year-old linebackers in attendance. If I wanted Declan, nobody in either family argued.

They trusted him with me to a degree no reasonable parent should have trusted any teenage boy.

I had only recently begun to appreciate the possibilities.

The hospital kept me for hours.

Nothing catastrophic. Nothing that explained what had happened.

Dad disappeared periodically to talk to Riot and whoever was still searching. Mom stayed until a nurse finally convinced her to go get something to eat.