A laugh burst out of Beth; she clapped her hand over her mouth. “No he didn’t.”
“He did.” Mandy nodded, smiling faintly. “He did and we laughed. We laughed, and we laughed, until we cried.”
“Did you…do you have children now?”
Mandy met her gaze. “I stopped trying after the third miscarriage.”
Silence fell between them. Beth spun through another scenario, one in which she had been brave enough to tell her father she was pregnant, one in which she had carried the baby to term, and given it to someone like Mandy. “You must hate me,” Beth whispered.
For a long moment Mandy didn’t speak. Then she lifted her chin. “I don’t hate you,” she said carefully. “If you and I both told people our stories, even the most pro-life advocates would see mine as a tragedy. Yours is a crime.” She thought for a moment. “It’s funny. The logic goes that as a minor, you can’t exercise free will to consent, because you don’t have the mental capacity to do so. But in your case, the fetus is getting the protection you’re not, as if its rights are worth more than your own.”
Beth stared at her. “So what happens now?”
“You’re going to get discharged from the hospital, in a day or so. And then you’ll stay in custody until the trial.”
Beth’s heart monitor began to spike. “No,” she said. “I can’t go to jail.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
I never did,Beth thought.
—
“YOU’RE LYING,” GEORGE SAID.“MYdaughter isn’t here.”
Fuck that cop. He might be fishing for information, but that didn’t mean George planned to give it to him. Yet now that Hugh McElroy had brought up his daughter, he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
Was Lil all right?
Was she looking for him?
“Because she doesn’t know what you’re doing,” Hugh said. “Am I right?”
Lil knew that he loved her. He loved her so much that he had come here to make things right, even though it seemed impossible. George would never meet his grandchild. He just hoped this had not cost him Lil, too.
“How would she feel about you being here, George?”
He had not been thinking about that, clearly, when he came. He was just an avenging angel for her suffering. And he had been thinking of God’s word. An eye for an eye.
A life for a life.
“What’s her name, George?”
“Lil,” he said, the syllable falling from his lips.
“That’s pretty,” Hugh said. “Old school.”
George hated that he’d left her after they argued. He knew she’d be well taken care of in his absence, but he also knew he had fucked up. He’d just never been good with speeches. He didn’t know how to say what he was feeling. Pastor Mike used to call him a man of few words, but reminded him that deeds spoke a thousand times more loudly.
That’s why he was here, wasn’t it?
The drive here had been long, and his thoughts had provided the soundtrack for the journey. He had imagined Lil in all the incarnations of her life—the time she was a baby with croup and he sat up with her all night in a steamy bathroom, the shower blasting hot water; the Father’s Day when she tried to make him pancakes for breakfast and set a dish towel on fire; the sound of her voice harmonizing with his when they sang at church. Then he’d pictured himself like an avenger, swollen to comic-book-hero proportions, bursting through the doors of the clinic and leaving destruction in his wake.
He had imagined screams and falling plaster and a haze of dust. But somehow although he could see himself when he started shooting, everything afterward was fuzzy. Revenge, in theory, throbbed with adrenaline and was clean with conviction. In reality, it was rushing into a house on fire, and forgetting to map out your exit.
Behind him, George heard a ripple of conversation. He turned around, the phone still clutched to his ear. “Quiet,” he ordered.
“What’s going on in there?” Hugh asked.
