"Haley Briggs told the whole school that her cousin OD'd last weekend. She was crying in the bathroom during third period." A pause. "Is that true? About the drugs? That people are dying?"
My hands tighten on the wheel. "Where'd you hear that?"
"Dad. Everyone's talking about it. That girl Caitlyn who died—she was a junior. I had Advanced English with her last year." Her voice is flat in a way that scares me because it sounds like mine. "Is it really that bad?"
I want to lie. God, I want to lie.
I want to tell her it's not that bad, that the news exaggerates, that Morgantown is safe and her school is safe and nothing is coming for the people she knows.
I want to wrap her in the same bubble I've been trying to keep around both of them since the day Angelica left and I became the only wall between my daughters and the world.
But Wrenleigh is sixteen and sharp and she reads bullshit the way her sister reads me
Instantly, completely, without mercy.
"Yeah," I say. "It's that bad."
She's quiet for a long time. "Are you doing something about it?"
I look at her.
She's looking back at me with those blue eyes—her mother's eyes, but there's nothing of her mother in them right now.
This is all her. All Wrenleigh. The girl who refused to cry with a bone sticking out of her leg.
"Yeah, baby. We're doing something about it."
She nods once, turns back to the window and the conversation is over.
We pick up Sadie Jo.
She climbs in the back seat, takes one look at Wrenleigh's face, takes one look at mine, and says nothing.
She pulls out her homework and starts working on it in the back seat because that's what Sadie Jo does—she reads the room and she adjusts and she carries on, and it breaks my heart every single time.
Leah shows up at six.
I don't expect her.
She calls first. Calls me, not Garrett, which means she got my number from someone and I don't have time to think about what that means—and says Vanna mentioned Wrenleigh was asking about physical therapy exercises she could do at home, and she has some printouts from the PT department, and she can drop them off if it's not a bad time.
It's aterribletime.
There's a full-patch member of the Saint's Outlaws sitting on my front porch with a gun under his cut, photographs of my daughters in my wallet, and a debt I didn't earn hanging over my house like a storm cloud.
"Sure," I say. "Come by whenever."
Bloodhound is on the porch when she pulls up.
I watch from the kitchen window as she gets out of her car—still in her scrubs from work, her hair pulled back, her badge still hanging from the lanyard around her neck.
She sees Garrett and stops.
They talk. I can't hear what they're saying, but I can read the body language—Leah's hands on her hips, the tilt of her head that means she's asking a question she already knows the answer to.
Garrett's arms crossed, his chin down, giving her nothing.
The Mercer standoff. I've seen it before.
