It's something else.
Something that looks like the first tentative, terrified step toward trusting a woman again.
"No," I say. "She didn't."
Wrenleigh looks at Leah. Leah looks back.
And something passes between them… not words, not a gesture.
Just a look.
The kind of look that happens between two people who've been through something together.
Wrenleigh leans her head against Leah's shoulder.
Just for a second. Maybe two. Then she straightens up, grabs the bat, and says, "I'm going to my room."
She stops at the bottom of the stairs and turns back.
"You're staying, right?" she asks. And she's looking at Leah.
"I'm staying," Leah says.
Wrenleigh nods, goes upstairs and closes her door.
Not with anger this time.
Just with the quiet exhaustion of a girl who's been carrying too much for too long and finally found one more person she can trust to hold it.
I call Ruger from the back porch at midnight.
Leah is inside with Sadie Jo, who won't sleep unless Leah is in the room.
I can hear Leah's voice through the wall—low, steady, reading something aloud.
A book, maybe. Or just talking. Filling the silence with something safe.
"Church," I say. "Now."
"Already called," Ruger says. "Everyone's rolling in. Thirty minutes."
"Who's on the house?"
"Bloodhound and Maddox. Both of them. Together. All night."
"Good."
"Coin." His voice drops. "How are the girls?"
I lean against the porch railing.
The night air is cold and I can see my breath, the mountains in the dark, just the shape of them, the black ridge against the slightly less black sky.
"Sadie Jo has handprint bruises on her arm," I say. "A grown man grabbed my thirteen-year-old daughter hard enough to bruise her. In her own kitchen. In her own home."
Ruger is quiet for a long time.
When he speaks, his voice is something I've only heard a few times—the voice underneath the President, underneath the leader, underneath the careful, measured authority he wears like a second skin. The voice of a man who has drawn a line and watched someone cross it.
