Why would a young person confess to murdering an imaginary friend? This is the question that keeps therapist Selena Harris up at night. Having been in the business of helping adolescents for more than a decade, she thought she had seen and heard it all—until she met Leal Porter. Sitting on a couch two feet across from her is an ordinary-looking teenager who claimed in a text, inadvertently broadcast to his entire school, he drowned an innocent child left in his care. With no evidence to support Leal Porter’s testimony, authorities have referred him to Selena for counseling. Although she believes the alleged victim is the product of her client’s fevered imagination, she harbors one major doubt: What if she’s wrong? Challenging her therapeutic distance is the emotional bond she develops with this lonely, isolated boy whom classmates describe as “that scrawny kid who talks to himself at his locker.” Stepping outside of her office to search for clues that could help her client deal with past trauma, Selena is determined to separate fact from fiction. But nothing in her career prepares her for what she discovers is Leal’s intention to make her a permanent part of his fantasy world.