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to kill him or he wasn’t. Connor had already cowered before this man once. He wasn’t going to do it again. “You were already having an affair with Frank’s wife, so you weren’t exactly stellar father material to begin with. Then she tried to call it off and you killed her. Am I up to speed enough for you now?”

He saw a flash of anger behind Austin’s eyes. “That’s where you have it wrong. There was no affair. I didn’t kill her. Frank did. Kim and Frank set me up to take the fall. So this—this was payback. It was their turn to spend their lives in a cage. As far as I was concerned, they could stay there until they died of old age. I planned to be there for you. To take their place. To finally have my chance to be your father. I was never going to tell you how we were related, but I figured with time you would come to see me as family anyway.”

Connor tried to wrap his head around this. He wasn’t sure whether to believe Austin. Was it like Olivia had said? Had all those years behind bars twisted his memory? No, Connor thought, they didn’t. He knew Austin well enough to know he wasn’t crazy. Even as part of Connor rebelled against the idea that Frank and his mom had killed Frank’s wife and conspired to frame Austin, he knew there was something true about what Austin was saying. And it was enough to make him lean back and listen—really listen—to what Austin had to say next.

“I made sure you were taken care of, didn’t I?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Do you think that money you found on the dining room table just came out of nowhere?”

Austin was talking about the money that was now stashed away in the back of Connor’s sock drawer. Thinking about the money also made him think about Roland. Whatever secrets he and Frank had, there was now no doubt in Connor’s mind that he wasn’t involved in this.

But there was that word: secrets. This whole thing was about secrets. And didn’t it make it just a little more plausible that if Frank had secrets with Roland, he had darker secrets, as well?

Yes, it did.

Then Connor remembered something else. There was a question he had been asking himself since the night of the abduction. In the big picture, it didn’t matter very much. But he still wanted to know, and this seemed like it might be his only opportunity to find out. “How did you get into the house so fast?”

Austin leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and intertwining his fingers. “I’m not very proud of that. It’s the only time I’ve ever manipulated you, and I’m sorry for that. But it was necessary.”

“What do you mean?”

“Remember when I told you I kept a spare key hidden under a statue here in case I got locked out? And I asked if you did something similar at your house?”

Connor hadn’t thought about that conversation since it had happened. At the time, it had seemed just like one man giving advice to another. Now he saw it for what it really was. “And I told you we had a fake rock hidden in the bushes by the door.”

“Kim told me that’s where her mom hid hers when she was growing up, so I thought she would probably do the same thing, too. But I needed to be sure.”

“How did you get out?”

“What do you mean?”

“Of prison. In the Czech Republic.”

“I would rather not talk about that.”

“You want to be my dad. You want me to trust you. Tell me how you got out.”

Austin looked down, shook his head, then took a sip of his coffee. “You should try it.” He nodded at the second mug. “It’s good.”

Connor didn’t respond.

“Do you remember when you were four, you wanted to know what I did at work? And when I told you I was a programmer, you asked me what that was?”

“No.”

“Anyway, we sat down at the computer together and I taught you just enough so you could write an if/then statement on your own. You were so excited. I’m glad to see you’re still using those skills.”

That part Connor remembered. But up until now, he would have sworn it was Frank he had been sitting with. Thinking about it, that didn’t make sense, though. Frank managed the development of properties for Leewood Construction. He didn’t know anything about programming. He had even told Connor as much. “I don’t know how anybody can sit behind a computer and do that stuff all day,” he had said. “That stuff’s all mumbo-jumbo to me.”

He was surprised the two contradicting memories had managed to exist in his head for so long without ever raising a flag. It was the sort of thinking, he understood now, that allowed people like the sunners to hold on to their beliefs even when faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

“Anyway, in those days, I was as a senior software engineer for the city,” Austin said. “My primary job was upgrading and maintaining the code used by the New York Independent System Operator.”

Connor suspected he looked confused, because the next thing Austin said was: “I wouldn’t expect you to know who they are. Not a lot of people do. It’s complicated, but basically, they manage the flow of electricity up and down most of the East Coast.”

If Austin had stopped right there, Connor would have had enough information to sketch together the basics of what had occurred—it was a horrifying thought—but he kept going. “While I was in jail, I met a man named Aden Tindol. He was the only other American I ever saw there. He said he was Army. Busted for solicitation. He was out after only a few days. I figured he would forget about me a week after he was gone. But then, about a year ago, he paid me a visit. Said if