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that why she’d come back? For justice?
    And because he’d challenged her to. Her fan. The freak.
    She grabbed her cell phone off the nightstand and checked the time. Just after four. No way she could go back to sleep.
    Kat climbed out of bed. Her legs were wobbly, the wooden floor cool against the bottoms of her feet. She slipped into light sweats, visited the bathroom, then headed for the kitchen to start a pot of coffee.
    What had brought on the dream wasn’t a mystery. The letter. The bat. Luke’s warning to be careful. She stood a moment at the black-and-white-checked tile counter and watched the coffee drip into the glass carafe, then filled a small saucepan with milk. She heated the milk, then when the coffeepot chirped, she simultaneously poured the coffee and the milk into a mug.
    Cafe au lait. A south Louisiana tradition. One she’d been brought up on. When she was a little girl, her mother would heat a cup of milk for her, then add a splash of coffee. Coffee milk, she had called it.
    Kat carried the mug to the table and sat. She trailed her fingers over the table’s reclaimed cypress top. She’d always loved this table. Even when she’d been an out-of-control teen who hated everything.
    It’d been in her parents’ breakfast nook, and after they’d died, Sara had moved it here. Every morning it had seemed to greet her like a hug from her mom.
    No blood on this table. Thank God. She didn’t know if she could have borne it.
    There’d been so much blood.
    She glanced toward the living room. She could see the plastic bin, sitting on the coffee table where she’d left it. Lid off.
    She stood and slowly crossed to it. For long moments, she stared at it. The neatly organized letters. When she’d boxed them up, she’d boxed up her fear of their writer, as well. She’d labeled it upsetting but harmless .
    Not harmless. Not after last night.
    He’d been in her house. In her bedroom.
    She retrieved two letters from the box. The two most recent before last evening’s. Luke hadn’t looked at these. And she hadn’t offered them.
    But they were important.
    Kat brought them back to the kitchen and laid them carefully on the table. One she had received on the tenth anniversary of the murder. The other, exactly one month later, on the ninth anniversary of her acquittal.
    She took a sip of the now-tepid cafe au lait, then set the cup aside and opened the first, pulling out the single sheet of paper.
    What About Justice for Sara?
    Those words, on the tenth anniversary of losing her sister, had affected her like a kick in the teeth.
    What about justice for Sara?
    What about justice for her?
    She’d sat and stared at the words, tears rolling down her cheeks. Those tears had become sobs. Uncontrollable. As if she had pent up everything—anger, grief, confusion, disbelief—for ten long years. And now, finally, was releasing it.
    She’d cried for two days straight, then on and off for a month. And then the second letter had come.
    She picked it up, eased it out of the envelope.
    Coward. I Dare You.
    Tears had turned to realization. One of life’s aha moments.
    Ten years had passed and she hadn’t moved forward with her life. She’d matured, started a successful business, made friends. None of that mattered. Essentially, she was in exactly the same place as the day she walked out of the St. Tammany Parish courthouse a free woman.
    A coward, she was. She’d run away from Liberty and her accusers; she’d run away from the truth.
    And from her guilt. The almost paralyzing fear that her sister was dead because of her.
    Going back, she’d realized in that moment, was the only way to move forward.
    So here she was. Kat narrowed her eyes. The police, in their rush to judgment, had missed something. Something that would exonerate her and lead to the guilty party. The killer was still here in Liberty. She believed that to the very core of her being.
    In a strange way, the letters proved it.
    Her fan. Why had he urged her