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water oak, and sweetgum with its red-brown bark. A small porch held two wicker chairs and a tiny table. Empty flower boxes sat at each windowsill, waiting to be filled.
    Home.
    Allie rolled the word around in her mouth. It was strange, even thinking it. A place of her own. Somewhere without bars. Or guards. A space she could stretch out in and not touch cement wall.
    Allie’s breath quickened.
    Home was the ability to walk down a street and still be able to pick out the house where your first-grade teacher lived. Home was the knowledge that the local library still held that musty smell and books stacked to the ceiling. Home meant that when you went for a drive, every single person you passed waved.
    Allie loved Brunswick, always had. She’d grown up here, and had planned on coming back to practice after going to med school and completing her residency.
    Now, though, she was in many ways a female version of Robinson Crusoe. Shipwrecked, sea-salt brined, and beaten from the surf. Left to her own devices. A stranger in a strange land, empty-handed, wishing to God she had a compass and a radio to signal for help.
    She was starting over in Brunswick, but she was a survivor.
    After all, she’d lived through Arrendale, a jungle in its own right. A place so treacherous, so full of predators, many women didn’t make it out. She’d existed, however, relying on her own wits, her instincts. Tamping down fear and pushing away despair.
    Allie would prove her innocence. She would find the clues that linked Sheriff Gaines to Coach Boyd Thomas’s murder, if it was the last thing she did.
    And then, only then, Allie would be truly free.

SIX
    CAROLINE
    2016
    After splashing her face with water, Caroline pressed her forehead against the cold tile in the girls’ restroom.
    She didn’t need to go to an assembly, or any school event, for that matter. And Caroline certainly didn’t need to attend Mansfield Academy’s Career Day, with its parade of smiling working professionals in uniform, telling her about the great future available as an airline pilot or an Army Ranger. Or listen to someone’s uncle who spent the last thirty years working as a boat captain. Or, God forbid, listening to some all-knowing healer with his bright white doctor’s coat and shiny stethoscope. If someone announced that a lawyer or judge was talking today, she might actually scream.
    She couldn’t think about the future.
    Life as she knew it was over. Caroline needed an escape plan—now. A one-way ticket out of Brunswick, Georgia. A legitimate excuse to move to Switzerland. Or join the Peace Corps in Tanzania.
    Anywhere but here.
    The bell rang. She couldn’t procrastinate any longer. Caroline glanced in the long mirror to smooth her dark hair and made her way into the hallway, through the throng of jostling students, out the doors, toward the auditorium building.
    She followed the brick-lined walkways dusted with golden sand. The powdery crystals were everywhere—on the edges of the road, in sparse patches of grass on the middle school playground, and, on a windy day, in her hair and shoes.
    Inside the double doors, standing on tiptoes, she scanned the room for Maddie’s blonde head. Someone had waxed the floor to a dull shine, making everything smell of lemon. But the space was also dark and stuffy, like someone had flipped off the air-conditioning hours ago. It figured, when cramming together four or five hundred kids.
    Fanning her face, Caroline dodged a group of girls. With a glance at the rear of the room, she noticed Maddie’s hand in the air, waving. Gotcha. Third row back, fifth seat in. Relieved, Caroline quickened her pace. Stepping over book bags and easing past knees, she made her way down the aisle, finally sinking into the seat that had been saved for her.
    Caroline exhaled, leaning toward Maddie. “I really have to talk to you—”
    On stage, someone tapped a microphone. The dull sound reverberated around her. Teachers nearby clapped their