Somewhere downstairs, I hear sirens.
The police. The ambulance.
The machinery of the normal world arriving twenty minutes too late, the way italwaysdoes, to clean up what's already happened.
The police take statements.
Leah gives hers clinically.
Wrenleigh gives hers with the bat still in her hands, and the officer has the good sense not to ask her to put it down.
Sadie Jo gives hers in a whisper, sitting on the couch with Leah beside her, her bruised arm resting in Leah's lap while Leah holds an ice pack against it with one hand and answers questions with the other.
The officer looks at the bruises on Leah's face. Looks at the marks on Sadie Jo's arm. Looks at me.
"Mr. Adkins, do you have any idea who?—"
"No," I say. Flat. Final. Because the police can file their report and take their photos and follow their procedures, and none of it will fucking matter. None of it will be fast enough.
The men who did this don't answer to the legal system.
They answer to a different kind of justice—the kind that rides in a pack and doesn't file paperwork.
The officers leave. The ambulance leaves.
The house goes quiet in the worst way possible.
The silence of a place that's been violated, that doesn't feel safe anymore, that might never feel safe again.
Leah hasn't left Sadie Jo's side.
She's been a nurse, a mother, and a shield all night, and she's still doing it. Still checking Sadie Jo's arm, still talkingto Wrenleigh in that low, steady voice, still holding my house together while I come apart inside.
Sadie Jo is pressed against Leah's side.
Not mine. Leah's.
And Wrenleigh is sitting on Leah's other side, not touching her but close, as close as Wrenleigh gets to anyone, the bat finally on the floor but within reach.
"She stayed," Wrenleigh says.
I look at her. "What?"
"Leah." My daughter's blue eyes are fixed on the woman sitting between her and her sister. "She didn't run. They hit her, Dad. They hit her and she got back up and she stood between them and us and she didn't run."
The unspoken comparison fills the room like smoke.
Their mother ran. Their mother ran from everything.
From responsibility, from love, from the hard, grinding, beautiful work of raising two girls.
Angelica ran when things got hard and she kept running until she ran out of road and landed back here with a debt, a designer purse, and no idea how to be what these girls needed.
Leah didn't run. Leah stood in front of three armed men and saidsend it through meand took a fist to the face and didn't move.
Leah is sitting on my couch right now with a split lip and a blackening eye, holding my daughter's bruised arm with ice, and making sure everyone is okay before she'll let anyone look at her.
"She didn't run," Wrenleigh says again. Quieter this time. And her voice cracks the way it cracked in the kitchen when she told Angelica she was done, except this time it's not anger behind the crack.
