He stands, taps the table twice with his knuckles—his version of goodbye—and walks out.
I sit in the empty Church room for a few minutes. Just me, the table, and the white card sitting in the middle of it like a grenade with the pin half-pulled.
Two hundred thousand dollars.
My ex-wife's debt. My daughters' names. Men in suits who know where Wrenleigh eats lunch and where Sadie Jo catches the bus.
I pick up the card and put it back in my wallet. Then I pull the coin out and hold it. Don't flip it this time. Just hold it and feel the weight of it.
Three generations of Adkins men, all of them carrying things they didn't ask for, all of them too stubborn to set it down.
I call Aunt Ellie. "I'm on my way. How are they?"
"Wrenleigh's complaining about the cast and eating her weight in my banana pudding. Sadie Jo is doing homework at the kitchen table and keeps asking if you're okay." A pause. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine, Ellie."
"Mmhmm."
She doesn't believe me. She shouldn't. But she lets me have the lie because Ellie's been letting Mercer men and their stubbornness slide for thirty years, and she's not about to stop now.
I drive to her place and pick up my girls.
Wrenleigh talks the entire way home about a boy in her chemistry class who she either wants to kill or marry—the line is thin at sixteen—and Sadie Jo is quiet in the backseat, watching me in the rearview with those blue-gray eyes that see too much.
I make dinner. I help Sadie Jo with her homework. I watch Wrenleigh hobble around the living room on her crutches,picking a fight with the cat about who gets the good spot on the couch.
I do all the things I've done every night for ten years, and I do them the same way I always do—present, steady, holding it all together with hands that don't shake because I won't let them.
After they're in bed, I walk through the house. Check the locks. Check the windows. Check the cameras I installed two days ago that the girls haven't noticed yet.
I stand in the hallway between their bedrooms—Wrenleigh's door cracked open because she still won't admit she sleeps with the light on, Sadie Jo's closed because she's thirteen and privacy is everything—and I listen to them breathe.
My girls. My whole world. The only two things Angelica ever gave me that were worth a damn, and now she's put a price tag on them.
I lean against the wall, close my eyes and I make a promise to the dark, quiet hallway of my house that no one hears but me.
Nobody touches them. Nobody. Not the men in suits, not the people they work for, not the woman who gave birth to them and walked away.
I will burn every single thing in my path before I let anyone hurt my daughters.
And I won't even raise my voice when I do it.
I open my eyes. Check the locks one more time. Then I go to bed and I don't sleep, and I don't pretend to, and I spend the whole night listening for a knock that doesn't come.
Not tonight, but it will.
CHAPTER FOUR
Leah
The boy is seventeen years old and he's seizing on my table.
His name is Tyler. I know this because his friend—the one who drove him here in a Honda Civic with a cracked windshield and terror on his face—screamed it through the ambulance bay doors when they half-carried, half-dragged him in. "His name is Tyler, please, please help him, his name is Tyler and he won't stop shaking?—"
Tyler won't stop shaking because Tyler took what he thought was crystal meth at a house party in Westover, and whatever was in that baggie is lighting up his nervous system like a shorted fuse box.
His whole body is rigid, every muscle firing at once, his back arching off the gurney so hard I'm afraid he's going to crack his own spine.
