I drive to Suncrest, pick up Sadie Jo, and take both girls to Ellie's.
Wrenleigh is silent the whole drive—no jokes, no complaints, no arguments. Just silence. That scares me more than the crying.
Ellie takes one look at Wrenleigh's face and pulls her into a hug that lasts a long time.
Over Wrenleigh's shoulder, Ellie's eyes meet mine, and the question in them is clear:How bad?
I shake my head. I don't know yet.
I call Leah from Ellie's porch. She answers on the second ring.
"Leah, it's Coin. A girl from Wrenleigh's school just came into Ruby Memorial—possible OD. Her name is Haley Briggs. Wrenleigh's asking about her."
There's a pause. I hear the background noise of the ER—beeping, voices, the organized chaos that Leah lives inside twelve hours a day.
"I'll find out," she says. "Give me twenty minutes."
She calls back in fifteen.
Haley is alive.
Fentanyl-laced meth, same as all the others.
She's in the ICU, intubated, critical but stable.
The next twenty-four hours will tell.
I relay this to Wrenleigh. She nods. Doesn't speak.
She just goes inside Ellie's house and sits at the kitchen table and stares at her hands for a long time, and I let her, because sometimes the bravest thing you can do for your kid is let them sit with something terrible and not try to fix it.
But I want to fix it. God, I want to fix it.
I want to ride out with my brothers on Friday and burn that stash house to the ground and find every single person responsible for putting this poison in my daughter's school and make them answer for it in ways that would make the loan sharks look civilized.
Friday. Two days. I can hold it together for two more days.
Ellie arranges a sleepover.
That's what Ellie does—she reads the situation twelve steps ahead of everyone else and builds a safety net before you even know you need one.
The girls stay at her place. Wrenleigh and Sadie Jo in the guest room, Ellie down the hall, her shotgun in the closet and her phone on the nightstand.
She won’t let anyone get close to my girls.
I go home to an empty house.
The chairs are pushed in. The glass is washed. The cameras are running. The locks have been changed—Maddox came over while I was at Ellie's and installed deadbolts on every door, heavy-duty, the kind you'd need a battering ram to get through.
He didn't charge me. He didn't say much. He just did the work and left, because that's Maddox.
The house is quiet. The wrong kind of quiet—the kind Coin told Leah about on the porch.
The kind that presses against the walls and reminds you that you're alone.
I'm standing in the kitchen when the knock comes.
Soft. Two raps. I know that knock.
