down to the police station and put you into an interrogation room, and they’re going to start asking hard questions on the record.”
Amy’s fingers kneaded the ladybug. “What are you talking about? They think I did this? They think I had something to do with Lucy’s abduction?”
“What they know is that you’ve been lying to us. They know that you’re not Amy Walsh.”
Amy started to speak but the words got choked off in her throat. She looked away and put a hand over her mouth.
Josie said, “I don’t want to believe that you had anything to do with this. But Amy, from where the rest of us are standing, it sure doesn’t look good.”
Amy was silent for a long moment. When she looked back at Josie and spoke, her words were so low, Josie strained to hear them. “What do I do?”
“Tell me the truth. Right now. In this room. If you had nothing to do with Lucy’s abduction, then whatever you’re hiding won’t matter.” Josie pointed to the closed door. “Right now, my colleagues are starting to focus on you, which is completely understandable. I get where they’re coming from. When you find out someone is lying about a bunch of things—big things—it’s not a stretch to think they could be lying about the crime you’re trying to solve.”
“I had nothing to do with Lucy’s abduction,” Amy said firmly. “I swear to you. I just want her back.”
“So do I,” Josie said. “My focus is on Lucy. I don’t give a damn about anything but getting that little girl back alive. That’s it. That’s all. So there is nothing you can tell me, no secret you can divulge to me, that is going to matter if you didn’t do this. I don’t care if you killed someone, Amy, but you need to tell me. Now. Before my colleagues come through that door and this whole thing spins out of control.”
Tears rolled down Amy’s cheeks. She clutched the ladybug again. Her eyes started to get that unfocused, vacant look again.
Josie said, “Why did you assume Amy Walsh’s identity?”
Amy blinked, her gaze darting to Josie’s face and then back to the other side of the room where the butterfly garden hung. “I had to. I needed one.”
“Does Colin know?”
“Of course not,” Amy responded. “He has no idea.”
“How did you do it?”
Amy said, “I knew Amy Walsh. She was my friend. Her mother took me in. Let me live with them. It was only a few months. Then they died. Car accident. Renita wasn’t with them, so she lived. But she wouldn’t have let me stay. She never liked me. I took Amy’s personal effects with me and went to New York City. I just… started using her identity. I lived in terror that someone would figure it out. But no one ever did. Until now. Did you know I’m not even forty-four? I’m only forty.”
Josie tucked that fact away. “Why did you do it?”
“Not everything I told you was a lie.”
“You were running from someone,” Josie coaxed. “An abusive lover?”
Amy swallowed. Her face flushed. “Not a lover,” she choked out.
“A boyfriend? Husband?”
“I was a prisoner, do you understand? A prisoner. I got away from him. I had no choice.”
“Who was he, Amy?”
She shook her head vigorously. “I told you, he’s dead. I’ll never speak his name again.”
“Amy, I need the truth.”
Something in her eyes flared. “I’m telling you the truth.”
“Then what was your name before you were Amy Walsh?”
“If you know I was never Amy Walsh, then you must know my real name.”
Josie didn’t want to alert her to the fact that they didn’t have that information yet, so she said, “I need to hear it from you.”
Amy said nothing. More tears rolled down her face. “The person I was before is a ghost. A fiction. She always was.”
Josie was growing frustrated with Amy’s cryptic answers. She wanted to shake the woman but at the same time, it was the most honest she had been thus far. “You were someone else before you assumed Amy Walsh’s identity. I need to know who,” Josie prompted.
Amy looked back at the butterfly garden, lines appearing on her forehead. “No,” she said softly. “I don’t think I was. I wasn’t anyone.”
“Amy,” Josie said, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice. “I need you to be straight with me right now. Stop talking around this.”
Another small, bitter laugh. “Around it? It’s been over twenty years, and I still haven’t made sense of any of