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A dark-haired stranger came asking about my fights the night before Delilah turned up in my hay. Her daddy is asking about her all over town after a year of never saying her name there. He's the man whose gambling debt I sold off, and my initials are on the sale. Somewhere out there are the men who held her in a cellar.

None of them scare me as much as what I want right now. I want her to go quiet under my voice again, and this time I want her to ask me for it.

She goes to the top of the steps and stops with one hand on the post. She's looking out at the guest house. Its door still hangs open, and its porch light is on.

"I'm going back," she says. "I'm leaving that bolt open tonight. If anybody comes up that drive, you'll hear them before I do. And if the bolt gets to me again, I know the code."

I look across the yard at that open door. "Tomorrow I'll pull the deadbolt off. I'll put one of these on that door instead."

"No."

"It won't take me an hour."

"Leave the bolt." She turns and looks at me straight. "I'm not letting a sound run me out of that bed. If it takes me weeks, I'll learn to hear that bolt slide and know I'm the one on the inside holding it. You pull it off, and they win that one, too."

Bull riders get back on the same bull that broke their arm the week before, because they won't let that wreck be how it ends. I never once talked one of them out of it, and I'm not about to start with her.

"Then it stays," I tell her. "I'll walk you back."

"You'll watch me walk back. From right here."

I don't like it, and she can see that I don't. I lean on the door frame and stay put.

She starts down the steps, careful of her ribs. On the bottom one she stops and turns around, and the light over the steps falls full on her face.

"Sunday I'm going to church," she says. "Come or don't."

7

DELILAH

Knox wears a pressed white shirt and a gun to church. The shirt is tucked into his good jeans. The pistol rides in a leather holster on his right hip, where every usher in First Hill Country Fellowship can see it.

He takes the aisle end of the third pew on the piano side and sits with his boots planted and his shoulders square to the aisle. Anybody who wants to get to me has to go through him.

I sit beside him in the pew. Every Sunday of my life, I played the opening hymn and then slid in right here. My back is straight and my hands are folded in my lap. Yesterday Knox sent Beckett to Kerrville with my sizes written on the back of an envelope, and Beckett came home with jeans, shirts, sneakers, socks, and this blue dress. The dress has long sleeves. I hold the cuffs pinched in my fingers so they can't ride up and show anybody the scars the zip ties left on my wrists.

Up in the pulpit, my father stops in the middle of a sentence.

"Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is..."

That's as far as he gets. His hands are flat on the pulpit, and his mouth hangs open on the next word. He's staring straight down at me.

He's thinner than he was a year ago. His suit coat hangs loose at the shoulders, and his hair has gone gray at the temples.

I grew up under a voice that could fill this sanctuary to the rafters without a microphone. What came out of him just now was thin and tired.

Knox doesn't look at the people turning around in their pews. He looks at my father and doesn't blink. Daddy's eyes slide off him and come back to me, like he can't hold them on Knox for long.

Behind me, the whispering starts.

"Is that..."

"The preacher's daughter."

"They said she ran off."

A woman a few pews back says the last part loud enough to carry, and I know her voice from every potluck of my childhood. "Ran off as far as Devil's Acre, looks like. Look who she's sitting with."