“This isn’t your initial,” she said, dropping her voice to just above a whisper. “This is Dean’s initial. We knew you were listening. We knew you’d be back to check his work, and that the only way you’d believe that he didn’t have ulterior motives was if there was proof.” Her finger made another loop of the R. “I told him to do it. I begged him to, I made him promise to, and he did—no matter how sick it made him, no matter how much it has haunted him ever since, he did it. And it worked.” “No.” “You believed the act. You trusted him, because you wanted to believe that he was your son, that
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