Trauma did strange things to the brain.
They’d taken her away on her seventeenth birthday—social services arriving in that white van like a promise and a punishment all at once. The O’Haras had fought to keep her. She’d seen the paperwork on Tommy O’Hara’s desk, the adoption application half filled out in Simone’s careful handwriting. But the system had other ideas, and Marnie had been too broken at the time to fight for herself.
So she’d spent a year in foster care. And it hadn’t been so bad. Actually, it had been pretty amazing in its own quiet way. She’d had secondhand clothes that fit her and three meals a day. A room of her own with a door that locked from the inside. And there was never the telling hiss of the belt as it was pulled through belt loops, never the sharp crack as it connected with flesh.
She’d survived. That’s what she did. That’s what she’d always done.
Between scholarships and working full-time, she’d managed to make her way through college—waiting tables and cleaning houses and taking every odd job that came her way. She’d taken photography on a whim, a way to fulfill a fine arts credit and try something new. But instead of just another class to get through, she’d found a calling. A purpose. A way to tell stories that didn’t require her to open her mouth and let the words tumble out.
Life looked different through a lens. There was always beauty through the lens, even when life wasn’t so beautiful. The camera became her shield and her voice, the one way she could connect with the world without letting it get too close.
After college she’d ended up in Nebraska for a couple of years. Then Kentucky. Virginia. Tennessee. Georgia. Never staying long in any one place. Never growing roots or making friends, because there was an intimacy to friendship and relationships that wasn’t worth the pain or heartache. She’d learned that lesson well enough.
She missed Sloane terribly. And the rest of the O’Haras as well. They’d been her true family and she hadn’t even realized it until she was halfway across the country with nothing but a secondhand camera and a heart full of ghosts.
And then there was Beckett.
She didn’t let herself think about Beckett. Not if she could help it. Loving like that wasn’t worth it in the long run. Nothing should be that painful.
As she’d aged, she’d learned to control her gift with the same discipline she’d once used to make herself invisible in her father’s house. She could choose now—when to open that door in her mind and when to keep it firmly shut. And if she could help others the way she’d needed to be helped, then she’d do whatever she could. Even at the cost of being ridiculed or ostracized.
Even at the cost of being called a fraud or a witch or worse.
Not everyone wanted her help. But there were enough who’d witnessed her gifts with their own eyes to seek her out. Progressive police departments who wanted to solve crimes badly enough that they’d bring her in, often as a last resort when every other lead had gone cold. She didn’t do it for money—in fact, she always refused payment of any kind. She wasn’t a charlatan. And she didn’t need or want the money. Growing up poor had had its advantages. She was used to a frugal life and hard work. She knew how to stretch a dollar until it screamed.
Her time behind the camera paid the bills. Portraits of children with gap-toothed smiles and sticky fingers. Wedding after wedding—brides in white and grooms in black and all the hope and terror that came with promising forever to another person. She photographed it all with the same careful attention, even when the cynical part of her wondered how many of those forever promises would actually last.
But it was the photographs she took outside of those events that held her heart. The ones she took for herself, in the quiet hours when no one was watching.
She was fascinated by faces. Old faces lined with years of living. Young faces still soft with possibility. The weathered face of a fisherman mending his nets at dawn. The tired face of a waitress at the end of a double shift. Every face had a story written across it, if you knew how to read the lines.
She’d often wondered what story her own face had told as a child. And if anyone had bothered to look at it—really look—and see what was written there.
She’d built her portfolio over the years, one photograph at a time. Little by little, some of her pieces had started to sell. She’d scrimped and saved, eating ramen noodles and thrift store bread, until she had enough to open her first studio in Savannah. A tiny space above a bookshop, with good light and exposed brick walls and just enough room for her equipment and her dreams.
And then Clive Wallace had walked through her doors one rainy afternoon.
He’d looked at her and her work with a critical eye that had immediately set her on edge—the kind of appraising look that made her feel like a horse at auction. She didn’t know him or even recognize his name. But he was one of the biggest art dealers in the world. And he wanted her work.
And as she’d discovered later, he’d wanted her too.
Her life had been a whirlwind for almost two years—working almost nonstop and collecting enough pieces for a show in his New York gallery. It was some of the best work she’d ever done. Her focus was sharp, honed by the constant pressure of deadlines and expectations. She thought maybe this was the life she was supposed to lead. A rags-to-riches story where good triumphed over evil and the broken girl from nowhere Idaho got her happy ending.
The show was a success. The money started rolling in—more money than she’d ever seen in her life, more than she’d ever thought she’d have. And Clive became her lover, even though he was almost twenty years older and much more experienced. Even though something in the back of her mind—that instinct that had kept her alive in her father’s house—whispered that this wasn’t right. That she was trading one kind of cage for another.
But she’d ignored that whisper. Clive was exciting and sophisticated. He showed her things naïve girls from small-town Idaho didn’t often get to see. Private jets and five-star hotels and parties where champagne flowed like water. And sometimes—sometimes he was able to make her forget where she came from.
Sometimes forgetting felt like freedom.
And then she’d gotten a phone call from Lieutenant Navarro in Miami. He’d seen reports about the work she’d done for other departments, cases she’d helped solve when all other leads had dried up. He wanted her help. Off the books, because his captain wasn’t as open to her particular kind of assistance as he was.
She wasn’t a stranger to the news—her face had appeared on camera several times after helping with particular cases—but she didn’t crave the attention. The spotlight made her uncomfortable, made her feel too exposed. But Clive had wanted her to take the job. The publicity would be good for her next showing, he’d said. Good for business. Good for them.
So they’d gotten on the next available flight and headed to Miami.
There’d been a series of kidnappings—all infants between the ages of six weeks and nine months old. Stolen from their cribs, from their strollers, from their mothers’ arms. The cops had tracked down a nurse at one of the hospitals who’d admitted to selling patient information to an unknown third party. She’d entered the information on a website that had been set up specifically for this purpose, and they’d deposited money in her bank account. Two other nurses at other hospitals had also confessed once the clues led to them.
But the nurses had no idea what had happened to the babies. Their involvement hadn’t reached that far, though they’d each be doing a stretch behind bars for their part in it. The cops were stumped on how to find the children or where they’d ended up. And the hope of finding them alive was almost none.
