And Ava could see it, then, in the desperate sheen coating his eyes; she could hear it in the doubt thinning his voice: That even Ray wasn’t convinced by his theories. That he didn’t really believe the Poppy Fields had killed Johnny. But Ray had been denied the chance to say goodbye, to say I’m sorry, to say I love you. He’d been tossed into the riptide and was grasping at rocks to keep himself from drowning. And Ellis’s creation, the Poppy Fields’ sleep, was the only nearby stone in the water where his fingers didn’t slip off.
