“No,” I said, keeping the phone pressed to my ear. “Stay.”

Vance started walking down the driveway, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his dark coat.

“I’ve spent the last forty-eight hours looking into your early twenties, Avery,” Vance said.

“Denver can be a very small town when you start pulling old banking records.”

A cold knot formed in my stomach.

I remembered those years all too well, the ones I had tried to bury when Elliot took me in.

The year I turned twenty-two, when my mother left for California and my father refused to cosign my student loans.

The year of the broken leases, the maxed-out credit cards, and the debt collectors who called my rented room at dawn.

“There’s nothing to find,” I lied, my voice sounding thin.

“You were evicted from a basement apartment on Logan Street in twenty-fourteen,” Vance said.

“You had three outstanding default judgments from credit agencies before you were twenty-five.”

“I was twenty-two and abandoned,” I said, my teeth chattering from the draft in the cab.

“The courts don’t care about context, Avery,” Vance said.