But now and then, rarely, he had encountered the other thing, the person whose eyes stayed level and open and outward-facing all the way to the end, who met your gaze not with the guilty man’s flinch but with a kind of bewildered, exhausted appeal, as if to say, you can see me, why can you not see this.

Mitchell had learned to be afraid of those eyes, because a few times in his career they had turned out, too late, to have been telling the truth.

Elena Cole had those eyes.

He had spent five years telling himself he was imagining it, and the reason he could never quite finish believing his own reassurance was that, deep down, he knew he was not.

Chapter 4 — Bring the Child