Garrett appears in the kitchen doorway after they've gone.
He looks at Angelica the way a bouncer looks at someone who's about to be escorted out—not cruel but final, like he's urging her to leave.
"I'll put her at the Super 8 on University," he says to me. Not to her. To me. "Rookie can check on her in the morning."
"Fine."
Angelica starts to speak—to protest, to plead, to do something—and Garrett turns those cold eyes on her and she stops.
Because Bloodhound doesn't have to say a word.
Bloodhound just has to look at you, and the conversation is over.
She stands. Picks up her purse—designer, worn at the corners, a prop from a life she can't afford anymore. She looks at me one more time.
"I am sorry, Colton. I know you don't believe me. But I am."
"I believe you're sorry you got caught," I say.
She leaves. Garrett follows.
The front door closes, and the silence rushes in like water filling a hole.
Leah finds me on the back porch.
I don't know how long I've been out here.
Long enough that the cold has gotten into my joints and my coffee is untouched and the coin has been flipped so many times my thumb has gone numb.
The backyard is dark. No stars tonight—clouds have rolled in from the west, thick and low, the kind that mean rain by morning.
She doesn't say anything at first. Just sits down next to me in the chair where Bloodhound usually keeps watch, pulls her knees up, and waits.
She's still in her scrubs. Still wearing the badge on the lanyard. Still smelling like the hospital and something underneath that's just her.
"The girls?" I ask.
"Asleep. Both of them. Wrenleigh's door is shut, which means she's angry and processing. Sadie Jo's is cracked open with the light on."
She knows which one sleeps which way.
She's been here enough to know that.
The fact that she checked on them—went upstairs, looked in on my daughters, made sure they were okay before she came to find me—does something to the already cracked-open thing in my chest.
"I need to tell you something," I say.
"Okay."
"You're not going to like it."
"Okay."
I tell her everything.
The men on the porch.
The debt—two hundred thousand dollars, Angelica's gambling, my name and the girls' names as collateral.
