Her smug smile slipped, but only for a heartbeat. “It was a joke. Calm down.”

I stood so fast my chair cracked against the hardwood. My father was out of his seat at once, planting himself in front of the back door. “Peyton, sit down.”

I looked at his hand on the deadbolt. Then at the fresh mud caked on Wyatt’s designer boots. Then at the brand-new security camera above the kitchen window — angled toward the backyard instead of the front drive.

“You moved him outside,” I said, and the realization landed like a blow.

My mother rolled her eyes and sighed. “He wanders. We had to protect him from himself.”

I shoved past my father, threw the lock, and ran across the rain-soaked lawn. The heavy shed door was chained with an industrial steel padlock. Behind the wood, something scraped weakly against the panel.

“Grandpa?”

A ragged cough answered from the dark.

I pulled a compact entry tool from my bag and snapped the padlock shackle in one clean motion. The door swung open.

Franklin Caldwell sat on a stained, sodden mattress under a leaking roof. His thin wrists were bruised. His cheeks had caved into his skull. A plastic bowl of gray, stagnant water sat beside his knee.

When he saw my shape in the doorway, his cracked lips began to tremble.

“Peyton,” he breathed, his voice a frail thread. “They told me… they told me you abandoned me.”