Chapter 25

That’s not the truth, though. He knows the house. He’s probably been watching it, and us, or he wouldn’t have known when we were gone so he could do the thing with the knife. And his email about Jack? Has he actually seen him at school? Maybe followed him there, from here?

He went to the window after each terrifying dream, cautiously peering out from behind the curtains, trying to see if there was a strange car on the street that could be Tony’s.

Is that shadow by the tree a man, or my imagination? Is the guy walking a dog, with the hood of his sweatshirt hiding his face a neighbor, or Tony?

He’d go back to bed, staring into the dark, until sleep finally came—only to awaken an hour or two later from another nightmare and go through the whole routine again.

“You look like hell,” Deacon said when Max ran into him in the upstairs hallway at eight Wednesday morning. “Bad dreams?”

“You have no idea. He was killing you, or Jack, the way he tried to kill me.” Max shuddered