A Spark of Light is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2018 by Jodi Picoult

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Picoult, Jodi, author.

Title: A Spark of Light : A Novel / Jodi Picoult.

Description: First edition. | New York : Ballantine Books, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018018966 | ISBN 9780345544988 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780345544995 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Sagas. GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3566.I372 L43 2018 (print) | LCC PS3566.I372 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018966

Hardcover ISBN 9780345544988

International edition ISBN 9781984817310

Ebook ISBN 9780345544995

randomhousebooks.com

Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook

Cover design: Laura Klynstra

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Five p.m.

Four p.m.

Three p.m.

Two p.m.

One p.m.

Noon

Eleven a.m.

Ten a.m.

Nine a.m.

Eight a.m.

Epilogue

Author’s Note

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

By Jodi Picoult

About the Author

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?

—REVEREND DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

Five p.m.

THE CENTER SQUATTED ON THE CORNER OF JUNIPER AND MONTFORT behind a wrought-iron gate, like an old bulldog used to guarding its territory. At one point, there had been many like it in Mississippi—nondescript, unassuming buildings where services were provided and needs were met. Then came the restrictions that were designed to make these places go away: the halls had to be wide enough to accommodate two passing gurneys; any clinic where that wasn’t the case had to shut down or spend thousands on reconstruction. The doctors had to have admitting privileges at local hospitals—even though most were from out of state and couldn’t secure them—or the clinics where they practiced risked closing, too. One by one the clinics shuttered their windows and boarded up their doors. Now, the Center was a unicorn—a small rectangle of a structure painted a fluorescent, flagrant orange, like a flag to those who had traveled hundreds of miles to find it. It was the color of safety; the color of warning. It said: I’m here if you need me. It said, Do what you want to me; I’m not going.

The Center had suffered scars from the cuts of politicians and the barbs of protesters. It had licked its wounds and healed. At one point it had been called the Center for Women and Reproductive Health. But there were those who believed if you do not name a thing, it ceases to exist, and so its title was amputated, like a war injury. But still, it survived. First it became the Center for Women. And then, just: the Center.

The label fit. The Center was the calm in the middle of a storm of ideology. It was the sun of a universe of women who had run out of time and had run out of choices, who needed a beacon to look up to.

And like other things that shine so hot, it had a magnetic pull. Those in need found it the lodestone for their navigation. Those who despised it could not look away.

—

TODAY, WREN MCELROY THOUGHT, WAS not a good day to die. She knew that other fifteen-year-old girls romanticized the idea of dying for love, but Wren had read Romeo and Juliet last year in eighth-grade English and didn’t see the magic in waking up in a crypt beside your boyfriend, and then plunging his dagger into your own ribs. And Twilight—forget it. She had listened to teachers paint the stories of heroes whose tragic deaths somehow enlarged their lives rather than shrinking them. When Wren was six, her grandmother had died in her sleep. Strangers had said over and over that dying in your sleep was a blessing, but as she stared at her nana, waxen white in the open coffin, she didn’t understand why it was a gift. What if her grandmother had gone to bed the night before thinking, In the morning, I’ll water that orchid. In the morning, I’ll read the rest of that novel. I’ll call my son. So much left unfinished. No, there was just no way dying could be spun into a good thing.

Her grandmother was the only dead person Wren had ever seen, until two hours ago. Now, she could tell you what dying looked like, as opposed to just dead. One minute, Olive had been there, staring so fierce at Wren—as if she could hold on to the world if her eyes stayed open—and then, in a beat, those eyes stopped being windows and became mirrors, and Wren saw only a reflection of her own panic.

She didn’t want to look at Olive anymore, but she did. The dead woman was lying down like she was taking a nap, a couch cushion under her head. Olive’s shirt was soaked with blood, but had ridden up on the side, revealing her ribs and waist. Her skin was pale on top and then lavender, with a thin line of deep violet where her back met the floor. Wren realized that was because Olive’s blood was settling inside, just two hours after she’d passed. For a second, Wren thought she was going to throw up.

She didn’t want to die like Olive, either.

Which, given the circumstances, made Wren a horrible person.

The odds were highly unlikely, but if Wren had to choose, she would die in a black hole. It would be instant and it would be epic. Like, literally, you’d be ripped apart at the atomic level. You’d become stardust.

Wren’s father had taught her that. He bought her her first telescope, when she was five. He was the reason she wanted to be an astronaut when she was little, and an astrophysicist as soon as she learned what one was. He himself had had dreams of commanding a space shuttle that explored every corner of the universe until he got a girl pregnant. Instead of going to grad school, he had married Wren’s mom and become a cop and then a detective and had explored every corner of Jackson, Mississippi, instead. He told Wren that working for NASA was the best thing that never happened to him.

When they were driving back from her grandmother’s funeral, it had snowed. Wren—a child who’d never seen weather like that in Mississippi before—had been terrified by the way the world swirled, unmoored. Her father had started talking to her: Mission Specialist McElroy, activate the thrusters. When she wouldn’t stop crying, he began punching random buttons: the air-conditioning, the four-way flashers, the cruise control. They lit up red and blue like a command center at Mission Control. Misson Specialist McElroy, her father said, prepare for hyperspace. Then he flicked on his brights, so that the snow became a tunnel of speeding stars, and Wren was so amazed she forgot to be scared.

She wished she could flick a switch now, and travel back in time.

She wished she had told her dad she was coming here.

She wished she had let him talk her out of it.

She wished she hadn’t asked her aunt to bring her.

Aunt Bex might even now be lying in a morgue, like Olive, her body becoming a rainbow. And it was all Wren’s fault.

You, said the man with a gun, his voice dragging Wren back to the here and now. He had a name, but she didn’t want to even think of it. It made him human and he wasn’t human; he was a monster. While she’d been lost in thought, he’d come to stand in front of her. Now, he jerked the pistol at her. Get up.

The others held their breath with her. They had, in the past few hours, become a single organism. Wren’s thoughts moved in and out of the other women’s minds. Her fear stank on their skin.

Blood still bloomed from the bandage the man had wrapped around his hand. It was the tiniest of triumphs. It was the reason Wren could stand up, even though her legs were jelly.

She shouldn’t have come here.

She should have stayed a little girl.

Because now she might not live to become anything else.

Wren heard the hammer click and closed her eyes. All she could picture was her father’s face—the blue-jean eyes, the gentle bend of his smile—as he looked up at the night sky.

—

WHEN GEORGE GODDARD WAS FIVE years old, his mama tried to set his daddy on fire. His father had been passed out on the couch when his mother poured the lighter fluid over his dirty laundry, lit a match, and dumped the flaming bin on top of him. The big man reared up, screaming, batting at the flames with his ham hands. George’s mama stood a distance away with a glass of water. Mabel, his daddy screamed. Mabel! But his mama calmly drank every last drop, sparing none to extinguish the flames. When George’s father ran out of the house to roll in the dirt like a hog, his mama turned to him. Let that be a lesson to you, she said.

He had not wanted to grow up like his daddy, but in the way that an apple seed can’t help but become an apple tree, he had not become the best of husbands. He knew that now. It was why he had resolved to be the best of fathers. It was why, this morning, he had driven all this way to the Center, the last standing abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi.

What they’d taken away from his daughter she would never get back, whether she realized it now or not. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t exact a price.

He looked around the waiting room. Three women were huddled on a line of seats, and at their feet was the nurse, who was checking the bandage of the doctor. George scoffed. Doctor, my ass. What he did wasn’t healing, not by any stretch of the imagination. He should have killed the guy—would have killed the guy—if he hadn’t been interrupted when he first arrived and started firing.

He thought about his daughter sitting in one of those chairs. He wondered how she’d gotten here. If she had taken a bus. If a friend had driven her or (he could not even stand to think of it) the boy who’d gotten her in trouble. He imagined himself in an alternate universe, bursting through the door with his gun, seeing her in the chair next to the pamphlets about how to recognize an STD. He would have grabbed her hand and pulled her out of there.

What would she think of him, now that he was a killer?

How could he go back to her?

How could he go back, period?

Eight hours ago this had seemed like a holy crusade—an eye for an eye, a life for a life.

His wound had a heartbeat. George tried to adjust the binding of the gauze around it with his teeth, but it was unraveling. It should have been tied off better, but who here was going to help him?

The last time he had felt like this, like the walls were closing in on him, he had taken his infant daughter—red and screaming with a fever he didn’t know she had and wouldn’t have known how to treat—and gone looking for help. He had driven until his truck ran out of gas—it was past one A.M., but he started walking—and continued until he found the only building with a light on inside, and an unlocked door. It was flat-roofed and unremarkable—he hadn’t known it was a church until he stepped inside and saw the benches and the wooden relief of Jesus on the cross. The lights he had seen outside were candles, flickering on an altar. Come back, he had said out loud to his wife, who was probably halfway across the country by now. Maybe he was tired, maybe he was delusional, but he very clearly heard a reply: I’m already with you. The voice whispered from the wooden Jesus and at the same time from the darkness all around him.

George’s conversion had been that simple, and that enveloping. Somehow, he and his girl had fallen asleep on the carpeted floor. In the morning, Pastor Mike was shaking him awake. The pastor’s wife was cooing at his baby. There was a groaning table of food, and a miraculously spare room. Back then, George hadn’t been a religious man. It wasn’t Jesus that entered his heart that day. It was hope.

Hugh McElroy, the hostage negotiator George had been talking to for hours, said George’s daughter would know he had been trying to protect her. He’d promised that if George cooperated, this could still end well, even though George knew that outside this building were men with rifles trained on the door just waiting for him to emerge.

George wanted this to be over. Really, he did. He was exhausted mentally and physically and it was hard to figure out an endgame. He was sick of the crying. He wanted to skip ahead to the part where he was sitting by his daughter again, and she was looking up at him with wonder, the way she used to.

But George also knew Hugh would say anything to get him to surrender to the police. It wasn’t even just his job. Hugh McElroy needed him to release the hostages for the same reason that George had taken them in the first place—to save the day.

That’s when George figured out what he was going to do. He pulled back the hammer on the gun. “Get up. You,” he said, pointing to the girl with the name of a bird, the one who had stabbed him. The one he would use to teach Hugh McElroy a lesson.

—

HERE WAS THE PRIMARY RULE of hostage negotiation: Don’t fuck it up.

When Hugh had first joined the regional team, that’s what the instructors said. Don’t take a bad situation and make it worse. Don’t argue with the hostage taker. Don’t tell him, I get it, because you probably don’t. Communicate in a way that soothes or minimizes the threat; and understand that sometimes the best communication is not speaking at all. Active listening can get you a lot farther than spouting off.

There were different kinds of hostage takers. There were those who were out of their head with drugs, alcohol, grief. There were those on a political mission. There were those who fanned an ember of revenge, until it flared up and burned them alive. Then there were the sociopaths—the ones who had no empathy to appeal to. And yet sometimes they were the easiest to deal with, because they understood the concept of who’s in control. If you could make the sociopath believe that you were not going to cede the upper hand, you’d actually gotten somewhere. You could say, We’ve been at this for two hours (or six, or sixteen) and I get what’s on your mind. But it’s time to do something new. Because there is a group of men out here who think time’s up and want to address this with force. Sociopaths understood force.

On the other hand, that approach would fail miserably with someone depressed enough to kill himself and take others with him.

The point of establishing a relationship with a hostage taker was to make sure that you were the only source of information, and to give you the time to find out critical information of your own. What kind of hostage taker were you facing? What had precipitated the standoff, the shoot-out, the point of no return? You might start trying to build a relationship with innocuous conversation about sports, weather, TV. You’d gradually find out his likes and dislikes, what mattered to him. Did he love his kids? His wife? His mom? Why?

If you could find the why, you could determine what could be done to disarm the situation.

Hugh knew that the best hostage negotiators called the job a ballet, a tightrope walk, a delicate dance.

He also knew that was bullshit.

No one ever interviewed the negotiators whose situations ended in a bloodbath. It was only the ones with successful outcomes who got microphones stuck in their faces, and who felt obligated to describe their work as some kind of mystical art. In reality, it was a crapshoot. Dumb luck.

Hugh McElroy was afraid his luck was about to run out.

He surveyed the scene he had spearheaded for the past few hours. His command center was an event tent the department had used a few weeks ago at a community fair to promote safe child fingerprinting. Beat cops were posted along the building’s perimeter like a string of blue beads. The press had been corralled behind a police barricade. (You’d think they’d be smart enough to get further out of the range of a madman with a gun, but no, the lure of ratings was apparently too high.) Littered on the sidewalk like empty threats were placards with giant pictures of babies in utero, or hand-drawn slogans: ADOPTION, NOT ABORTION! IT’S A CHILD, NOT A CHOICE.

Ambulances hunkered, manned by EMTs with foil blankets and portable IVs and hydration. The SWAT team was in position waiting for a signal. Their commander, Captain Quandt, had tried to boot Hugh off the case (who could blame him?) and take the shooter by force. But Hugh knew Quandt could do neither of these things in good conscience, not if Hugh was on the verge of getting George Goddard to surrender.

This was exactly what Hugh had been banking on when he broke the second rule of hostage negotiation five hours ago, screaming onto the scene in his unmarked car, barking orders to the two street cops who’d been first responders.

The secondary rule of hostage negotiation was Don’t forget that this is a job.

Hostage negotiation is not a test of your manhood. It is not a chance to be a knight in shining armor, or a way to get your fifteen minutes of fame. It may go your way and it may not, no matter how textbook your responses are. Don’t take it personally.

But Hugh had known from the get-go that was never going to be possible, not today, not this time, because this was a different situation altogether. There were God knew how many dead bodies in that clinic, plus five hostages who were still alive. And one of them was his kid.

The SWAT commander was suddenly standing in front of him. “We’re going in now,” Quandt said. “I’m telling you as a courtesy.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Hugh replied. “I’m telling you as a courtesy.”

Quandt turned away and started to speak into the walkie-talkie at his shoulder. “We’re a go in five … four …” Suddenly his voice broke. “Stand down! I repeat—abort!”

It was the word that had started this disaster. Hugh’s head flew up, and he saw the same thing Quandt had noticed.

The front door of the clinic had suddenly opened, and two women were stepping outside.

—

WHEN WREN’S MOTHER STILL LIVED with them, she’d had a spider plant that she kept on top of a bookcase in the living room. After she left, neither Wren nor her father ever remembered to water it, but that spider plant seemed to defy death. It began to spill over its container and grow in a strange verdant comb-over toward a window, without playing by the rules of logic or gravity.

Wren felt like that now, swaying on her feet toward the light every time the door opened, drawn to where her father stood in the parking lot outside.

But it wasn’t Wren who was walking out of the building. She had no idea what it was that her father had said to George during their last phone conversation, but it had worked. George had pulled back the trigger and told her to move the couch that he had used to buttress the door. Although the hostages couldn’t talk freely without George hearing, a current had passed among them. When he instructed Wren to open the lock, she had even begun to think she might get out of here in one piece.

Joy and Janine had left first. Then George told Izzy to push out Dr. Ward in the wheelchair. Wren had thought that she’d be released then, too, but George had grabbed her by her hair and yanked her back. Izzy had turned at the threshold, her face dark, but Wren had given a small shake of her head. This might be Dr. Ward’s only chance to get out, and he was hurt. She had to take him. She was a nurse; she knew. “Wren—” Izzy said, but then George slammed the door behind her and drove home the metal bolt. He released Wren long enough to have her shove the couch in front of the doorway again.

Wren felt panic rise in her throat. Maybe this was George’s way of getting back at her for what she’d done to him. She was alone in here now, with this animal. Well, not quite—her eyes slid along the floor to Olive’s body.

Maybe Aunt Bex was with Olive, wherever you go when you die. Maybe they were both waiting for Wren.

George sank down on the couch in front of the door, burying his face in his hands. He was still holding the gun. It winked at her.

“Are you going to shoot me?” she blurted.

George glanced up as if he was surprised she would even ask that question. She forced herself to meet his gaze. One of his eyes pulled the tiniest bit to the right, not so much that he looked weird, but enough that it was hard to focus on his face. She wondered if he had to consciously pick which view he took in. He rubbed his bandaged hand across his cheek.

When Wren was little, she used to hold her hands to her father’s face to feel his stubble. It made a rasping sound. He’d smile, while she played his jaw like an instrument.

“Am I going to shoot you?” George leaned back on the cushions. “That depends.”

—

IT ALL HAPPENED SO FAST. One minute Janine Deguerre was a hostage, and the next she was in a medical tent, being checked over by EMTs. She looked around, trying to find Joy, but the other hostage with whom she had walked outside was nowhere to be seen.

“Ma’am,” one of the first responders said, “can you follow the light?”

Janine snapped her attention back to the kid, who in fact probably wasn’t much younger than she was—twenty-four. She blinked at him as he waved a little flashlight back and forth in front of her face.

She was shivering. Not because she was cold, but because she was in shock. She’d been pistol-whipped earlier across the temple, and her head was still throbbing. The EMT wrapped a silver metallic blanket around her shoulders, the kind given to marathon runners at the finish. Well, maybe she had run a marathon, metaphorically. Certainly she had crossed a line.

The sun was low, making shadows come to life, so that it was hard to tell what was real and what was a trick of her eyes. Five minutes ago Janine had arguably been in the worst danger of her life, and yet it was here underneath a plastic tent surrounded by police and medical professionals that she felt isolated. The mere act of walking past that threshold had put her back where she had started: on the other side.

She craned her neck, looking for Joy again. Maybe they had taken her to the hospital, like Dr. Ward. Or maybe Joy had said, as soon as Janine was out of earshot: Get that bitch away from me.

“I think we should keep you for observation,” the paramedic said.

“I’m okay,” Janine insisted. “Really. I just want to go home.”

He frowned. “Is there someone who can stay with you tonight? Just in case?”

“Yes,” she lied.

A cop crouched down beside her. “If you’re feeling up to it,” he said, “we’re going to take you back to the station first. We need a statement.”

Janine panicked. Did they know about her? Did she have to tell them? Was it like going to court, and swearing on a Bible? Or could she just be, for a little longer, someone who deserved sympathy?

She nodded and got to her feet. With the policeman’s hand gently guiding her, she began to walk out of the tent. She held her metallic blanket around her like an ermine cloak. “Wait,” she said. “What about everyone else?”

“We’ll be bringing in the others as soon as they’re able,” he assured her.

“The girl,” Janine said. “What about the girl? Did she come out?”

“Don’t you worry, ma’am,” he said.

A surge of reporters called to her, shouting questions that tangled together. The cop stepped between her and the media, a shield. He led her to a waiting police car. When the door closed, it was suffocatingly hot. She stared out the window as the policeman drove.

They passed a billboard on the way to the station. Janine recognized it because she had helped raise money to erect it. It was a picture of two smiling, gummy-mouthed babies—one black, one white. DID YOU KNOW, it read, MY HEART BEAT EIGHTEEN DAYS FROM CONCEPTION?

Janine knew a lot of facts like that. She also knew how various religions and cultures looked at personhood. Catholics believed in life at conception. Muslims believed that it took forty-two days after conception for Allah to send an angel to transform sperm and egg into something alive. Thomas Aquinas had said that abortion was homicide after forty days for a male embryo and eighty days for a female one. There were the outliers, too—the ancient Greeks, who said that a fetus had a “vegetable” soul, and the Jews, who said that the soul came at birth. Janine knew how to consciously steer away from those opinions in a discussion.

Still, it didn’t really make sense, did it? How could the moment that life began differ so much, depending on the point of view? How could the law in Mississippi say that an embryo was a human being, but the law in Massachusetts disagreed? Wasn’t the baby the same baby, no matter whether it was conceived on a bed in Jackson, or on a beach in Nantucket?

It made Janine’s head hurt. But then, so did everything right now.

—

SOON IT WOULD BE GETTING dark. Wren sat on the floor cross-legged, keeping an eye on George as he hunched forward on the couch, elbows balanced on his knees, and the gun held loosely in his right hand. She tore open the last packet of Fig Newtons—all that was left of the basket of snacks taken from the recovery room. Her stomach growled.

She used to be afraid of the dark. She’d make her dad come in with his gun in his holster and check out the whole of her bedroom—beneath the bed, under the mattress, on the high shelves above her dresser. Sometimes she woke up crying in the middle of the night convinced she had seen something fanged and terrible sitting at the foot of her bed, watching her with its yellow eyes.

Now she knew: monsters were real.

Wren swallowed. “Your daughter,” she asked. “What’s her name?”

George glanced up. “Shut your mouth,” he said.

The vehemence of his words made her scoot back a few feet, but as she did, her leg brushed something cold and rigid. She knew right away what it was—who it was—and swallowed her scream. Wren willed herself to inch forward again, curling her arms around her bent knees. “I bet your daughter wants to see you.”

The shooter’s profile looked ragged and inhospitable. “You don’t know anything.”

“I bet she wants to see you,” Wren repeated. I know, she thought, because it’s all I want.

—

SHE LIED.

Janine sat in the police station, across from the detective who was recording her statement, and lied. “What brought you to the Center this morning?” he had asked gently.

“A Pap smear,” Janine had said.

The rest that she had told him was true, and sounded like a horror film: the sound of gunfire, the sudden weight of the clinic employee slamming into her and knocking her to the floor. Janine had changed into a clean T-shirt that the paramedics had given her, but she could still feel the woman’s hot blood (so much blood) seeping into her dress. Even now, looking down at her hands, she expected to see it.

“Then what happened?”

She found she could not remember in sequence. Instead of linked moments, there were only flashes: her body shaking uncontrollably as she ran; her hands pressed against the bullet wound of an injured woman. The shooter jerking his pistol at Janine, while Izzy stood next to him with a heap of supplies in her arms. The phone ringing, as they all froze like mannequins.

Janine felt like she was watching a movie, one she was obligated to sit through even though she had never wanted to see it.

When she got to the part where the shooter smacked her with the gun, she left out why. A lie of omission, that’s what they used to call it when she was a little girl going to confession. It was a sin, too, but of a different degree. Still, sometimes you lied to protect people. Sometimes you lied to protect yourself.

What was one more lie to add to the others?

She was crying as she spoke. She didn’t even realize it until the detective leaned forward with a box of tissues.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said.

“Of course.”

She swallowed. “Do you think that people get what’s coming to them?”

The detective looked at her for a long moment. “I don’t think anyone deserves a day like today,” he said.

Janine nodded. She blew her nose and balled the tissue into her hand.

Suddenly the door opened, and a uniformed officer stuck his head inside. “There’s a gentleman out here who says he knows you … ?”

Behind him, Janine could see Allen—his florid cheeks and broad belly, the one that made him joke that he knew what it was like to be pregnant. Allen was the leader of the local Right to Life group. “Janine!” he cried, and he pushed past the cop so that he could fold her into his arms. “Sweet Jesus,” he sighed. “Honey, we’ve been praying for you.”

She knew they prayed for every woman who walked through the doors of the Center. This, though, was different. Allen would not have been able to make peace with himself if anything had happened to her, because he had been the one to send her inside as a spy.

Maybe God had been listening, because she had been released. But so were Joy, and Izzy, and Dr. Ward. And what about those who didn’t make it out alive? What kind of capricious God would roll the dice like that?

“Let me take you home and get you settled,” Allen said. And to the detective, “I’m sure Miz Deguerre needs a little rest.”

The detective looked directly at Janine, as if to see whether she was okay with Allen calling the shots. And why shouldn’t she be? She had done what he wanted from the moment she arrived in town, intent to serve his mission any way she could. And she knew that he meant well. “We’re more than happy to give you a ride wherever you need to go,” the detective said to her.

He was offering her a choice; and it felt heady and powerful.

“I have to use the restroom,” she blurted, another lie.

“Of course.” The detective gestured down the hallway. “Left at the end, and then third door on the right.”

Janine started walking, still clutching her foil blanket around her shoulders. She just needed space, for a second.

At the end of the hallway was another interrogation room, much like the one she had been in. What had been a mirror on the inside was, from this vantage point, a window. Joy sat at a table with a female detective.

Before she realized what she was doing, Janine was knocking at the window. It must have made a sound, because Joy turned in her direction, even if she couldn’t see Janine’s face. The interrogation room door swung open, and a moment later a female detective looked at her. “Is there a problem?”

Through the open doorway, she met Joy’s gaze.

“We know each other,” Janine said.

After a moment, Joy nodded.

“I just wanted to … I wanted to see …” Janine hesitated. “I thought you might need help.”

The detective folded her arms. “We’ll make sure she gets whatever she needs.”

“I know but—” Janine looked at Joy. “You shouldn’t be alone tonight.”

She felt Joy’s eyes flicker to the bandage at her temple. “Neither should you,” Joy said.

—

IN THE HOSPITAL ROOM, THERE was a piece of tape stuck to one of the slats of the air-conditioning vent overhead. It fluttered like a ribbon, like an improbable celebration, as Izzy lay on her back pretending she didn’t feel the doctor’s hands on her.

“Here we go,” the OB murmured. He moved the wand left, and then right, and then pointed to the fuzzy screen, to the edge of the black amoeba of Izzy’s uterus, where the white peanut of the fetus curled. “Come on … come on …” There was something urgent in his voice. Then they both saw it—the flicker of a heartbeat. Something she had seen multiple times in other women’s ultrasounds.

She let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.

The doctor took measurements and recorded them. He wiped the gel off her belly and pulled the drape down to cover her again. “Miz Walsh,” he said, “you are one lucky lady. You’re good to go.”

Izzy struggled onto her elbows. “Wait … so … that’s it?”

“Obviously, you’ll want to make sure that you don’t have any cramping or bleeding in the next few days,” the doctor added, “but given the strength of that heartbeat, I’d say that little guy—or girl—is planning on sticking around. Definitely takes after its mama.”

He said he’d write up some discharge orders and ducked out of the curtain that separated her ER cubicle from the others. Izzy lay back on the gurney and slipped her hands underneath the scratchy blanket. She flattened them on her stomach.

As soon as she had gotten outside the clinic, the EMTs had put her on a stretcher beside Dr. Ward, even as she had tried to tell them she wasn’t hurt. He would have none of it. “She’s pregnant,” he insisted. “She needs medical attention.”

“You need medical attention,” she argued.

“There she goes again,” Dr. Ward said to the young paramedic inspecting his tourniquet. “Won’t give me a moment’s peace.” He caught her eye. “For which,” he said quietly, “I am supremely grateful.”

That was the last she had seen of him. She wondered if he was in surgery; if he would keep the leg. She had a good feeling about it.

Maybe some people simply were destined to survive.

She had grown up with a chronically unemployed father and a mother who struggled to take care of Izzy and her twin brothers, in a house so small that the three kids shared not just a room but a bed. But for a long time, she didn’t even know she was poor. Her mother would take them on a spare change hunt. They’d go fishing for dinner. Occasionally they celebrated Colonial Week—when they used candles instead of electric lights.

When Izzy thought about her life, there was such a clear break between then and now. Now, she lived with Parker in a house three times larger than her childhood home. He was, on paper, the prince from the entitled family who’d fallen for a debt-ridden nursing-student Cinderella. They had met when he was in traction with a broken leg. Their first date, he liked to say, had been a sponge bath.

Parker had gone to Yale like his father and grandfather and great-grandfather. He had grown up in Eastover, the snobbiest neighborhood in the whole state. He went to private schools and dressed in miniature blazers and ties even as a child. He summered. Even his job—a documentary filmmaker—was possible only because of his trust fund.

Izzy still ordered the cheapest thing on a menu if they ate out. Their freezer was packed with food, not because she couldn’t afford to go grocery shopping now, but because you never stopped anticipating another lean time.

They might as well have come from different planets. How on earth were they supposed to raise a child together?

Izzy wondered if now—finally—the fault line of her life would no longer be the first day she earned a paycheck. It would now be today’s shooting; she would divide everything into before and after.

A nurse entered the cubicle. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m good,” Izzy said, glad that her shaking hands were still tucked under the blanket.

“I got some information on that patient you asked after …”

“Dr. Ward?” Izzy sat up.

“No. The woman. Bex something? She came out of surgery okay,” the nurse said. “She’s in intensive care.”

Izzy felt tears spring to her eyes. Thank God. “And what about Dr. Ward?”

The nurse shook her head. “I haven’t heard anything yet, but I’ll keep an eye out.” She looked at Izzy with sympathy. “I guess y’all went through Hell together.”

They sure had. In trying to save Bex’s life, Izzy had pushed her finger through the other woman’s chest wall; had felt for the pillow of her labored lungs. She had been covered in Dr. Ward’s blood.

“The police want to talk to you,” the nurse said. “They’ve been waiting. But if you’re not feeling up to it, I’m happy to tell them.”

“Can I use the restroom, first?”

“You sure can,” the nurse replied. She helped Izzy off the gurney and led her through the curtain to a single-person bathroom. “You need any help?”

Izzy shook her head. She closed the door and locked it, leaned against the wood. The shakes had migrated from her hands to the rest of Izzy’s body. Her teeth were chattering now.

Textbook shock.

“Pull yourself together,” she commanded, and she ran water in the sink and splashed it on her face. She blotted her skin dry with paper towels, looking at the bathroom mirror, and immediately wished that she hadn’t. Her hair had long ago escaped its braid and was a hot red frizz around her face. The scrubs they had given her to replace the bloody ones she had been wearing when she was brought in were too big, and the top was slipping off one shoulder, like a really poor version of a sexy nurse fantasy. Although she had washed off most of the blood that covered her arms and neck, she could see the spots she had missed.

She scrubbed until her skin was raw and then walked back to her little cubicle. Hovering outside the curtain was a police officer. “Miz Walsh? I’m Officer Thibodeau. I was hoping you might be able to just give a short statement?”

She drew back the curtain and sat down on the gurney, her legs dangling. “Where do you want me to start?”

Thibodeau scratched above his ear with his pen. “Well, I guess at the beginning,” he said. “You went to the clinic this morning?”

“Yes.”

“How long have you worked there?”

Before she could respond, there was a voice demanding to know where Izzy was.

Parker.

Izzy’s legs slid off the table and she stepped forward as he pushed past the nurse and the resident who were trying to keep him out of the secure patient area.

“Parker!” she shouted, and his head snapped toward her.

“Izzy, my God.” He took three giant steps and crushed her into his arms. He held her so tight she almost couldn’t breathe. But she only noticed that when she touched him, she finally stopped shaking.

When the paramedics had first brought Izzy in and the intake nurse asked her who they could call as next of kin, Parker’s name had slipped out of her mouth. That was telling, wasn’t it?

Maybe there was a way to stop worrying about what might drive them apart, and to focus on what bound them together.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She nodded against him.

“You’re not hurt?” Parker pulled away, holding her at arm’s length. There were dozens of questions written across his features, and he stared into her eyes as if he were trying to find the answers. Or the truth. Maybe they were even, for once, the same.

This was not how—or where—she had thought her day would end. But somehow, it was exactly where she needed to be. “I’m fine,” Izzy said. She took his hand and flattened it against her belly, smiling. “We’re fine.”

Suddenly Izzy’s future no longer seemed impossible. It felt like the stamp of a passport when you reached your own country, and realized that the only reason you’d traveled was to remember the feeling of home.

—

WHEN ONE OF THE JUNIOR detectives brought the word that his older sister Bex was out of surgery, Hugh winged a silent thank-you to a God he had long ago stopped believing in. The part of his brain that had been worrying about her could go back to focusing on Wren, who was still in there with a murderer.

First the two women had been released. Then the nurse and the injured abortion doctor.

Hugh had waited. And waited. And … nothing.

He paced the command center from where he had made the call to give the shooter a few more minutes, in the hope he would make good on his promise to release all the hostages. The question was, had he made a bad decision? A fatal one, for Wren?

Captain Quandt approached once again, blocking Hugh’s path. “Okay, I’m done waiting. He released most of them. Now we’re flushing him out.”

“You can’t do that.”

“The hell I can’t,” Quandt said. “I’m in charge, Lieutenant.”

“Only on paper.” Hugh stepped closer, inches away from him. “There’s still a hostage. Goddard doesn’t know you from a hole in the wall. You go in there and we both know how this will end.”

What Hugh didn’t say was that it might still end that way. What if George had agreed to release the hostages, planning all along to go back on his word? What if he wanted to go out in a blaze of bullets, and take Wren with him? Was this going to be his ultimate fuck-you to Hugh?

Quandt met his gaze. “We both know you’re too close to this to be thinking clearly.”

Hugh remained immobile, his arms crossed. “That’s exactly why I don’t want you blasting through that goddamn door.”

The commander narrowed his eyes. “I will give him ten more minutes to release your daughter. And then I will do everything in my power to make sure she is safe … but we’re ending this.”

The minute Quandt walked away, Hugh picked up his cellphone and dialed the clinic number, the same one he had been using for hours now to speak to George. It rang and rang and rang. Pick up, Hugh thought. He had not heard any gunshots, but that didn’t mean Wren was safe.

After eighteen rings, he was about to hang up. Then: “Daddy?” Wren said, and he couldn’t help it, his knees just gave out.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he said, trying to tamp down the emotion in his voice. He remembered when she was a toddler, and she had fallen. If Hugh looked upset, Wren would burst into tears. If he seemed unfazed, she picked herself up and kept going. “Are you all right?”

“Y-yes.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“No.” A pause. “Is Aunt Bex—”

“She’s going to be fine,” Hugh said, although he did not know this for sure. “I want you to know I love you,” he added, and he could practically hear the panic rise in his daughter.

“Are you saying that because I’m going to die?”

“Not if I have anything to do with it. Would you ask George,” he said, and then he swallowed. “Would you ask him if he’d please speak to me?”

He heard muffled voices, and then George’s voice was on the line. “George,” Hugh said evenly, “I thought we had a deal.”

“We did.”

“You told me you’d release the hostages.”

“I did,” George said.

“Not all of them.”

There was a hitch in the conversation. “You didn’t specify,” George replied.

Hugh curled his body around the phone, like he was whispering to a lover. “You want to tell me what’s really going on, George?” A pause. “You can talk to me. You know that.”

“It’s all a lie.”

“What’s a lie?”

“Once I let your kid go, what happens to me?”

“We’ll talk about that when you come outside. You and me,” Hugh said.

“Bullshit. My life’s over, either way. Either I go to jail and rot there forever or they shoot me.”

“That won’t happen,” Hugh promised. “I won’t let it happen.” He glanced down at the notes he’d scribbled after his last discussion with George. “Remember? You end this, and you get to do the right thing. Your daughter—hell, the whole world—will be watching, George.”

“Sometimes doing the right thing,” George said quietly, “means doing something bad.”

“It doesn’t have to,” Hugh said.

“You don’t get it.” George’s voice was tight, distant. “But you will.”

That was a threat. That definitely sounded like a threat. Hugh glanced at the SWAT team commander. Quandt was staring at him from the corner of the tent. He lifted his arm, pointed to his watch.

“Let Wren go,” Hugh bargained, “and I will make sure you come out of this alive.”

“No. They won’t shoot me as long as I’ve got her.”

What Hugh needed to do was offer a viable alternative, one that did not involve Wren, but let George still believe he was protected.

Just like that, he knew what to do.

Hugh looked at the captain. There was no way Quandt would go for this. It was too risky. Hugh would lose his job—maybe his life—but his daughter would be safe. There was really no choice.

“George,” he suggested, “take me instead.”

—

BEX WAS DEAD. SHE HAD to be dead, because everything was white and there was a bright light, and wasn’t that what everyone said to expect?

She turned her head a fraction to the left and saw the IV pole, the saline dripping into her. The light overhead was fluorescent.

A hospital. She was the very opposite of dead.

Her throat tightened as she thought about Wren and about Hugh. Was her niece all right? She imagined Wren, knee bent, drawing on the white lip of her sneaker. She pictured Hugh leaning over her in the ambulance. That was how Bex saw the world, in images. Had she re-created it in her studio, she would call it Reckoning. She would highlight the cords of tension in Hugh’s neck, the vibration of Wren’s moving hand. The background would be the color of a bruise.

Bex had installations with collectors as far away as Chicago and California. Her works were the size of a wall. If you stood at a distance you might see a feminine hand on a pregnant belly. A baby reaching for a mobile overhead. A woman in the throes of labor. If you stepped closer, you saw that the portrait was made of hundreds of used, multicolored Post-it notes, carefully shellacked into place on a grid.

People talked about the social commentary of Bex’s work. Both her subject—parenthood—and her medium—discarded to -do lists and disposable reminders—were fleeting. But her transformation of that heartbeat, that particular second, rendered it timeless.

She had been famous for a brief moment ten years ago when The New York Times included her in a piece on up-and-coming artists (for the record, she never up and went anywhere, after that). The reporter had asked: since Bex was single and had no kids, had she picked this subject in order to master in art what was so personally elusive?

But Bex had never needed marriage or children. She had Hugh. She had Wren. True, she believed all artists were restless, but they weren’t always running in pursuit of something. Sometimes they were running away from where they had been.

A nurse entered. “Hey there,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

She tried to sit up. “I need to go,” she said.

“You aren’t going anywhere. You’re ten minutes out of surgery.” He frowned. “Is there someone I can get for you?”

Yes, please, Bex thought. But they are both currently in the middle of a hostage standoff.

If only it were that simple to rescue Wren. She couldn’t imagine what Hugh was feeling right now, but she had to believe in him. He’d have a plan. Hugh always had a plan. He was the one she called when the toilets in her house all stopped working at once, like a cosmic plot. He trapped the skunk that had taken up residence under her ancient Mini Cooper. He ran toward the scream of a burglar alarm, when everyone else was fleeing. There was nothing that rattled him, no challenge too daunting.

She suddenly remembered him, fifteen or sixteen, riveted by a comic book and completely ignoring her. Only when Bex grabbed it from him did he look up. Damn, Hugh had said, one syllable with equal parts shock, respect, and sadness. They killed off Superman.

What if she lost him? What if she lost them both?

“Can you turn on the television?” she asked.

The nurse pressed a button on a remote control and then settled it underneath Bex’s palm. On every local channel there was a live report about the Center. Bex stared at the screen, at the orange Creamsicle stucco of the building, the ribbons of police tape blocking it off.

She couldn’t see Hugh.

So she closed her eyes and sketched him in her imagination. He was silhouetted by the sun, and he was larger than life.

Bex could still remember the first time she realized that Hugh was taller than she was. She had been in the kitchen, making dinner, and had dragged a chair toward the cabinet so that she could reach the dried basil on the highest shelf. From behind her, Hugh had just plucked it off its rack.

In that moment, Bex realized everything was different. Hugh had grown up, and somehow she had gone from taking care of him to becoming the one who was being taken care of.

“Well,” she had said. “That’s handy.”

He’d been fourteen. He’d shrugged. “Don’t get used to it,” Hugh had said. “I won’t be here forever.”

Bex had watched him jog up the stairs to his room. And then, soon after, she had watched him go to college, fall in love, move into his own home.

No matter how many times you let someone go, it never got any easier.

—

HUGH HUNG UP THE PHONE. “I’m going in,” he announced. “Alone. He wants a hostage? He can have me.”

“Absolutely not,” Quandt said, turning to a member of his team. “Jones, get your team to—”

Hugh ignored him and started walking. Quandt grabbed Hugh’s arm and spun him around.

“If you storm in there, there will be casualties,” Hugh said. “I am the only one he trusts. If I can get him to walk out with me, it’s a win.”

“And if you can’t?” the commander argued.

“I won’t condone an action that risks my daughter,” Hugh snapped. “So where does that leave us?” His fury was a shimmering curtain, but there were glimpses of what he was hiding behind it.

The two men stopped, staring at each other, a standoff. Finally, Hugh glanced away. “Joe,” he said, his voice broken. “You got kids?”

The SWAT leader looked down at the ground. “I’m here to do a job, Hugh.”

“I know.” Hugh shook his head. “And I know I should have walked away as soon as I found out Wren was inside. God knows this is hard enough when you don’t have a personal stake. But I do. And I can’t sit on the sidelines, not if she’s in there. If you won’t do this for me, will you do it for her?”

Quandt took a deep breath. “One condition. I get a couple of snipers into position first,” he said.

Hugh held out his hand, and the men shook. “Thank you.”

Quandt met his gaze. “Ellie and Kate,” he said, just loud enough for Hugh to hear. “Twins.”

He turned away, calling over two of his men and pointing to the roof of a building across the street and a spot on top of the clinic. As they strategized, Hugh walked back underneath the tent. He saw the young detective who had brought him news of Bex. “Collins,” he called. “Over here.”

She hurried to the command tent. “Yes, sir?”

“That patient in the hospital—Bex McElroy, my sister? I need you to give a note to her.”

The detective nodded, waiting while Hugh sat down at his makeshift desk. He picked up a pen and ripped a page off his legal pad.

What did you say to the woman who’d basically raised you? The one who had nearly died today only because she had been trying to help his own daughter?

He thought of a dozen things he could tell Bex.

That she was the only one who laughed at his terrible dad jokes, the ones that made Wren cringe. That if he was on death row, his last meal would be her chicken Parmesan. That he could still remember her making shadow puppets on his bedroom wall, trying to bribe him to go to sleep. That, at age eight, he hadn’t known what the Savannah College of Art was—or even that she had given up her scholarship to come take care of him when their mother went to dry out—but that he wished he’d said thank you.

But Hugh had never been good at putting his feelings into sentences. It was what had led him to this very point, this very instant.

So he wrote down a single word and passed it to the detective.

Goodbye.

—

LOUIE WARD WAS UNCONSCIOUS, AND in the ocean of his memory, he was not a fifty-four-year-old ob-gyn but a young boy growing up beneath a canopy of Spanish moss, trying to catch crawfish before they caught him. He had been raised to love Jesus and women, in precisely that order. In southern Louisiana, he was reared by two ladies—his grandmama and Mama—living in a small cottage that was, as his grandmother pointed out, still a palace if the Lord dwelled there among you. He was a practicing Catholic, as was everyone else he knew, the result of a long-dead white landowner who had come from France with a rosary in his pocket and who had baptized all his slaves. Louie had been a sickly child, too skinny and too smart for his own good. He had wheezy lungs that kept him from tagging along with the other kids, who snuck at midnight into nearby houses rumored to be haunted, to see what they might find. Instead he followed his grandmama to Mass every day and he helped Mama with her piecework, using tweezers to pinch tiny links into gold chains that wound up around the necks of rich white women.

Louie had never met his father, and knew better than to ask about him since his grandmama referred to him as the Sinner, but whatever hole his father’s absence had left in him was, by age nine, well plastered over.

Louie knew how to open doors for ladies and to say please and thank you and yes, ma’am. He slept on a cot in the kitchen that he made with tight hospital corners, and helped kept the house tidy, because as his grandmama had taught him, Jesus was coming at any moment and they’d best all be ready. Mama had spells where she could not muster the courage to get out of bed, and sometimes spent weeks cocooned there, crying. But even when Louie was alone, he was never alone, because all the ladies in the neighborhood held him accountable for his behavior. It was child raising by committee.

Old Miss Essie came and sat on their porch every day. She told Louie about her daddy, a slave who had escaped his plantation by swimming through the bayou, braving the alligators because relinquishing his body to them would at least have been his decision. He had not only survived with all his limbs, he had hidden along the Natchez Trace, moving only by the light of the moon and following the instructions of everyday saints who had helped others get free. Eventually he had reached Indiana, married a woman, and had Miss Essie. She would lean forward, her eyes bright, and hammer home the moral of this story. Boy, she told Louie, don’t you let nobody tell you who you can’t be.

Miss Essie knew everything about everybody, so it was no surprise that she could tell tales about Sebby Cherise, the hedge witch rumored to be descended from the voodoo priestess Marie Laveau. What was a surprise was that Louie’s mama had been the one doing the asking. The bayou could be easily split between those who believed in gris-gris and those who believed in the Lord, and Grandmama had set her family squarely in the latter camp. Louie had no idea what his mama could possibly want from Sebby Cherise.

His mama was the most beautiful woman in the world, with sad eyes you fell into, and a voice that sanded all your rough edges. For the past few months he’d noticed that she hadn’t cried, and instead had been rising as if helium were pulsing through her veins. She hummed when she wasn’t aware, melodies woven through her braids. Louie rode the outskirts of her good mood.

When Mama knelt beside him and asked if he could keep a secret, he would have followed her to Hell and back. Which, as it turned out, was not that far from the mark.

That summer was a parched throat, and as Louie and his mama hiked to the witch’s home, his clothes became a second skin. Sebby Cherise lived in the bayou, in a hut with a porch that was draped with dried flowers. There were crudely lettered signs that said KEEP OUT.

Sebby Cherise traded in miracles. Jimsonweed, cut with honey and sulfur and crossed by the path of a black cat, could root out cancer. Dixie love perfume could net you the man who slipped into your dreams. Five-finger grass set a ward around your house to keep it safe. Louie wondered if it was one of Sebby’s potions or pouches that accounted for his mother’s recent good spirits.

He also knew, from his grandmama and the priest, that the deals you made with the devil came back to bite you. But just like his mama seemed willing to overlook that, so was Louie, if it meant she stayed this way.

His mama told him to stay on the porch, so he only had a glimpse of Sebby Cherise, with her long red skirt and the scarf wrapped around her head. She might have been twenty years old, or two hundred. She beckoned Mama inside, and the bangles on her arm sang. Her voice sounded like fingernails on wood.

It didn’t take long. Mama came out clutching a small packet on a string. She looped this around her neck and tucked it in under her dress, between her breasts. They went home, and that afternoon, Louie went to Mass with his grandmama and prayed that his mother had gotten whatever she needed, and that Jesus would forgive her for not going to Him instead.

One week later, it was so hot that Grandmama stayed at church between morning and evening Mass. Mama told Louie she was going to take a nap. Near dinnertime, Louie went to wake her up, but she didn’t answer at his knock. When he turned the knob he found his mother lying on the floor, a widening triangle of blood pooling between her legs. Her skin felt like marble, the only cool surface in the world.

—

THE OUTPOURING OF GOODWILL IN the aftermath of Mama’s death had given way to the whispers Louie heard when he passed folks in church, or walked down the street holding fast to his grandmother. Something about Mama and Mr. Bouffet, the mayor, who Louie knew only for his marshaling of the Mardi Gras parade with his pretty blond wife and matching blond daughters at his side. And something else about abortion: a word he had never heard before.

His grandmama would squeeze his hand to keep him from looking at the people who murmured behind their hands and stared.

She squeezed his hand a lot, those days.

She was squeezing now.

Dr. Louie Ward’s eyes flew open and he immediately struggled against his surroundings—the soft beep of a heart monitor, the snake of tubing in his IV. He didn’t feel pain in his leg, as he expected, but then if he was in a hospital he probably had some kind of nerve blocker. The only thing that hurt like hell was his hand, which was being clutched by a skinny girl with pink hair and a ring of hoops climbing the cartilage of her left ear. “Rachel?” he rasped, and her head flew up.

The administrative assistant at the clinic had pinched features that always reminded Louie of a badger. “I’m sorry, Dr. Ward,” she sobbed. “I’m so sorry.”

He glanced down at his leg, thinking for one panicked moment that perhaps it had been amputated, and that was the source of Rachel’s hysterics—but no, it was there, if swathed in batting like a cloud of cotton candy. Thank God for that nurse at the clinic. “Rachel,” he said, raising his voice over the sound of her weeping. “Rachel, I already feel like I was run over by a truck. Don’t give me a headache, too.”

But the girl showed no signs of quieting. He didn’t know her very well—he flew to many clinics around the country, and the staff often blurred with each other. He was pretty sure Rachel was a grad student at Jackson State. She worked part-time as what the antis called a “deathscort”—guiding women from the parking lot inside the clinic. She also helped Vonita, the clinic owner, with administrative work. There was so much to do at the Center that they all pitched in, wherever they had to.

“I’m sorry,” Rachel repeated, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

Louie was used to crying women. “You got nothing to be sorry about,” he said. “Unless your alter ego is a middle-aged white anti with a gun.”

“I ran, Dr. Ward.” Rachel mustered the courage to glance at him, but her gaze slid away again. “I’m a coward.”

He had not even known that she was in the building at the time the shooting began. Of course, she would have been up front, and he was in the rear in a procedure room. And naturally she wanted to believe she would have been a hero, when push came to shove. But you never knew what path you’d take until you got to that crossroads. Hadn’t Louie heard this a thousand times before, from patients who had come to the Center, who seemed shell-shocked to find themselves there, as if they’d awakened in someone else’s life?

“You’re alive to tell the story,” he said. “That’s what matters.” Louie was aware, even as he spoke, of the irony. He turned his own words over in his mind. Coal, with time and heat and pressure, will always become a diamond. But if you were freezing to death, which would you consider the gem?

—

I DIDN’T CLEAN THE HOUSE, Joy thought, as she unlocked the door of her apartment. Breakfast cereal had dried to a crust in a bowl on the kitchen table; there were empty glasses on the coffee table in front of the television; a bra dangled from the arm of the couch. “The place is a mess,” she apologized to Janine.

Then again, Joy had not expected to bring home an anti-abortion activist on the day she went to terminate her own pregnancy.

When the door opened, there was a scatter of mail on the floor. Joy started to bend down gingerly but Janine moved faster. “Let me,” she said.

Let me drive you home.

Let me get you settled.

Janine had taken over like a mother hen, which was odd given that they were probably close to the same age. She watched Janine gather the bill and flyers. “Perry,” Janine said, and she offered a small smile. “I didn’t know your last name.”

Joy looked at her. “Same.”

“DeGuerre,” Janine answered. She held out her hand. “Nice to meet you. Officially.”

Joy smiled awkwardly, uncomfortable with the forced intimacy. All Joy really wanted to do was strip down, get into her pajamas and fuzzy socks, have a glass of wine, and cry.

Janine set the mail on the kitchen table and turned. “What can I get you? Are you hungry? Thirsty? How about some tea? She paused. “Do you have tea?”

Joy couldn’t help it, she laughed. “Yeah. Cabinet over the stove.”

While the water boiled, Joy went to the bathroom. She had to change her sanitary napkin, but after a moment of panic realized she didn’t have any. She had been told to bring one to the Center since they didn’t provide them, and it had been the last in the box. She’d been planning to swing by the drugstore on the way home.

Frustrated, she tore apart the closet, the medicine cabinet, scattering pills and ointments and lotions.

The last thing she pulled out of the recesses of the drawer beneath the sink was a dusty, crusted bottle of calamine lotion. Calamine lotion. For fuck’s sake. She had calamine lotion, but not a pad?

Joy grabbed the bottle and hurled it at the bathroom mirror, shattering it.

There was a soft knock on the door. Janine stood there, holding her knapsack. She had left it locked in the trunk of her car that morning, so unlike the rest of the possessions of the hostages, it hadn’t been part of a crime scene. “I thought you might need this,” she said, and she held out a small, square wrapped Kotex pad.

Joy took it, closed the door, and went to the bathroom. She was angry that her savior—again—had been Janine. As she washed her hands, she looked into the fractured mirror. Her freckles stood out in relief from her pale skin; her hair looked like a small animal had taken up residence in it. There was blood on her neck. She rubbed it off with a washcloth. She kept rubbing until she hurt on the outside as much as she did on the inside.

When Joy came out of the bathroom, Janine had picked up the living room so that the newspapers were stacked neatly and the dirty dishes removed to the sink. She told Joy to sit down and carried over two steaming mugs of tea. Each bag was tagged with an inspirational quote. “May this day bring you peace, tranquillity, and harmony,” Janine read. She blew on the surface of the tea. “Well. Screw that.”

Joy looked at her own tag. “Your choices will change the world.” She stared at the words until they swam. She felt a rolling wave of relief.

The room was painfully silent. Janine felt it too. She reached for the television remote. “What do you think is going on?”

The picture blinked to life on the last channel Joy had been watching, which now showed the exterior of the clinic. It was dark, but police lights were still flashing. A reporter said something about a SWAT team, and there was a grainy photo of a marksman on a distant roof. Joy felt as if she were being suffocated. “Turn it off,” she said roughly.

The screen went blank. Janine set the remote down between them. “I just moved here. I don’t really know anyone in Mississippi,” she suddenly admitted. “Except, you know … the people I was with.”

“What do we do now?” Joy blurted out.

“What do you mean?”

“Tomorrow. I mean, how do we go back to normal?” Joy shook her head. “Nothing’s normal.”

“I guess we fake it,” Janine said. “Till we forget we’re faking.” She shrugged. “I’ll probably just do what I did before. Hold signs. Pray.”

Joy’s jaw dropped. “You’ll keep protesting?”

Janine’s glance slid away. “Who knows if the clinic will even open again.”

If after all that, other women didn’t have the opportunity do what Joy had done, then why had she lived through it at all?

Joy felt a surge of heat. How could Janine not recognize that it was rhetoric spouted by herself and her cronies that led to violence? When they passed judgment on people like Joy, it gave license to others to do it. And this time, the person who had done it had been wielding a gun.

“In spite of what happened today,” Joy said, incredulous, “you still think you’re right?”

Janine looked her in the eye. “I could ask you the same thing.”

Joy stared at this other woman, who believed the polar opposite of what she believed, yet with the same strength of conviction. She wondered if the only way any of us can find what we stand for is by first locating what we stand against.

“Maybe you’d better go,” Joy said tightly.

Janine stood up. She looked around, located her knapsack, and headed silently for the door.

Joy closed her eyes and leaned back on the couch. Maybe there just wasn’t any common ground.

Did all babies deserve to be born?

Did all women deserve to make decisions about their own bodies?

In what Venn diagram did those overlap?

She heard the knob turn, and then Janine’s voice. “Well,” she said, miffed, as if she were the one whose morality had been attacked. “Have a nice life.”

Joy wondered how you get someone you think is blind to see what you see.

It certainly can’t happen when you’re standing on opposite sides of a wall.

“Wait,” Joy said. She dug her hand into the pocket of her sweatpants. “Can I show you something?” She didn’t wait for Janine to respond. Instead she smoothed out the ultrasound picture on the coffee table. Her fingers touched the white edges.

She heard Janine close the door and walk back toward the couch. Janine looked at the grainy image, bearing witness.

“It’s—it was a boy,” Joy murmured.

Janine sank down beside her. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

Joy knew this wasn’t true; that Janine had a dozen responses, all of which were variants of the fact that Joy had made her choice; that she didn’t deserve to grieve. She wanted to tell Janine that yes, she had gotten what she wanted, but she also felt the pain of loss, and they were not mutually exclusive.

“Maybe neither of us should say anything,” Joy suggested.

Janine covered Joy’s hand with her own. She didn’t respond.

She didn’t have to.

She just had to be here, one woman holding up another.

—

ALMOST THREE HOURS NORTH OF the hostage standoff, in Oxford, Mississippi, a teenage girl curled on her side in bed at Baptist Memorial Hospital, wondering how she could feel so incredibly alone in a world so crowded with people. Beth rolled over when the door opened—her heart swelling with hope that maybe her father had come back to say that he was sorry, that he forgave her, that she could have a second chance. But it was only her court-appointed lawyer.

Beth glanced at the police guard at the door, and then at Mandy DuVille. “Did you find my dad?” she asked.

Mandy shook her head, but that wasn’t really an answer. Beth knew (because Mandy had told her) that she couldn’t and wouldn’t talk to her client while the policeman was present because there was no client-attorney confidentiality. Which was really just as well, because Beth didn’t need any more bad news. The charges weren’t going to be dropped. The prosecutor wanted to ride Beth’s sad little story all the way to Election Day. Beth was only collateral damage.

And what was her crime, exactly? She was a seventeen-year-old girl who didn’t want to be a mother, and because of that, she was going to lose what was left of her childhood. She had tried to get a judicial waiver because she knew her father would never sign the consent papers—even though by the time she had the baby, she’d be over eighteen. But her court date had been postponed for two weeks, and by then it would have been too late for her to have an abortion in the state of Mississippi. She’d been forced to take desperate measures.

Maybe if there were fewer laws, Beth thought, she wouldn’t have had to break them. Given how hard it was for her to get a legal abortion, why should she be punished for having an illegal one?

Suddenly reality knocked the breath out of her. It felt like the one time her father had taken her to see the ocean on the Georgia coast. Beth had been a kid. She had run toward the waves with her arms wide, only to find herself tumbled head over heels and nearly drowned. Her father had plucked her out of the surf before she could be washed away.

Who was going to rescue her now?

“I’m going to jail,” Beth said, her voice small. She was starting to see that nothing she had done, nothing Mandy DuVille could do, was going to untangle her from this mess. It was like when you tried to erase a mistake, and wound up ripping the paper instead. “I’m really going to jail.”

Mandy looked at the officer, who had turned around to face them. She raised a finger to her lips, reminding Beth not to speak in front of the cop.

Beth started to cry.

She curled her knees up to her chest, feeling empty inside. She was a husk, a shell, a rind. This was how badly she had fucked up. She had gotten rid of the baby, true, but she had also somehow excised her ability to feel. Maybe taking away the latter was the only way she could have taken away the former. Or maybe this was fate: if the only love you had ever known was conditional, so was the absence of it. She would rot away behind bars, missed by no one. Even if her father came back, it wouldn’t be to apologize. It would be to tell Beth how disappointed he was in her.

After a moment, she felt arms folding her close. Mandy was soft and smelled of peaches. Her braids tickled Beth’s cheek. This is what it could have been like, Beth thought.

After a few minutes, her sobs became hiccups. Beth lay down on the pillow, her fingers still threaded with Mandy’s. “You should get some rest,” her lawyer said.

Beth wanted to fall asleep. She wanted to pretend that today had not happened. Well, no. She wanted to pretend that today had gone differently. “Can you stay here?” Beth asked. “I don’t have—I don’t have anyone else.”

Mandy met her gaze. “You have me,” she said.

—

AS HUGH STARTED WALKING TO the front door of the clinic, he thought of the day that Wren was born. He and Annabelle had been at home watching a Harry Potter marathon when her contractions started. They were getting closer and closer, but Annabelle refused to leave until The Chamber of Secrets was over. Her water broke during the credits. Hugh drove like a maniac to the hospital, leaving the car in a loading zone, and got his wife settled on the delivery ward. She was already dilated 9^3⁄4 centimeters, which Annabelle saw as a sign.

I’m not naming her Hermione, Hugh had said, after the birth.

I’m not naming her after your mother, Annabelle had countered.

(Even back then, they had fought.)

The nurse, who had been following this conversation, opened a window. Maybe we all need a little fresh air, she suggested, just as a bird darted through. It fluttered to the lip of the bassinet where the baby was sleeping. The bird turned its head, fixed a bright eye on her.

Now, that’s a sign, Hugh said.

Wren was the very best thing that had ever happened to him.

He bought her her first bra. He let her paint his nails. He told her kids were assholes when she wasn’t invited to a popular girl’s birthday party, and then spitefully gave that girl’s mother a ticket the next day for jaywalking.

Every August they hiked to the highest spot in Jackson, waiting to see the Perseids, the meteor shower that made the sky look like it was weeping. They’d pull an all-nighter, talking about everything from which Power Ranger was expendable to how you find the person you want to spend your life with.

Hugh had had trouble with that one. In the first place, his judgment had been off; Annabelle now lived in France with a guy ten years her junior, a master baker who competed in the Bread Olympics, as if that was a thing. In the second place, the person he wanted to spend his life with had been placed into his arms by a labor and delivery nurse fifteen years ago.

Now, Hugh glanced over his shoulder. Captain Quandt tilted his head, speaking into a radio. “If you don’t get him to meet you partway, my snipers can’t get a clean shot,” he said to Hugh.

“Not my problem,” Hugh replied, moving forward.

“Hugh!”

He stopped.

“You don’t have to be a hero,” Quandt said quietly.

Hugh met his gaze. “I’m not. I’m a father.”

He squared his shoulders and started toward the clinic door. Behind him, the air was stale with heat; the only sound was the buzzing of mosquitoes.

He knocked. A moment passed, and then he could hear furniture scraping the floor.

The door swung open, and there stood Wren. “Daddy,” she cried, and she took a step toward him, but was jerked back inside. Hugh reluctantly tore his eyes away from his daughter to look, for the first time, at the man he had been talking to for five hours.

George Goddard was slight, around five-ten. He had a five o’clock shadow and a bandage wrapped around the hand that was holding a gun to Wren’s temple. His eyes were so light they appeared transparent. “George,” Hugh said evenly, and Goddard nodded.

Hugh was aware of the pulse leaping in his neck. He tried to keep himself calm, to not grab Wren and run, which could be disastrous. “Why don’t you step out here, and let her go?”

George shook his head. “Show me your weapon.”

Hugh held up his hands. “Don’t have one.”

The other man laughed. “You think I’m an idiot?”

After a hesitation, Hugh reached down and hiked up his pants leg, revealing the pistol he had strapped there. Keeping his eyes on George the entire time, he tugged the weapon free and held it off to the side.

“Drop it,” George ordered.

“Let go of her and I will.”

For a beat, nothing happened. June bugs paused midflight, the breeze died, Hugh’s heart missed a stitch. Then George shoved Wren forward. Hugh caught her up with his left arm, leaving the right outstretched with the weapon dangling. “It’s okay,” he whispered into his daughter’s hair.

She smelled of fear and sweat, the way she had when she was little and woke up from a nightmare. He drew back, threading the fingers of his free hand with one of hers. On the edge of her left palm was a little black star, inked like a tattoo at the juncture of her thumb and pointer. It felt like a sign. “Wren.” Hugh smiled at her, as best he could. “Go on now. Walk to the officers under that tent.”

She turned and looked at the command center, then back at him. She realized in that moment that he wasn’t coming with her. “Daddy, no.”

“Wren. Let me finish this.”

She took a breath, and nodded. Very slowly, she started to back away from him, toward the tent. None of the other officers stepped forward to swoop her to safety, as they had the other hostages. This was on Hugh’s order. Before, George had been hidden behind the security of his door, but now, he’d feel vulnerable. Seeing an approaching cop might trigger him, make him shoot in self-defense.

When Wren was a few steps away, George spoke. “Put down the gun.” He took his own firearm and pointed it at Hugh’s chest.

Hugh bent, slowly letting the weapon slip from his fingers. “All right, George,” he said. “What do you want to do, now? Your call.”

He saw the gunman’s eyes flicker around the rooftops, and prayed that if the snipers were in position, they were well concealed.

“You told me you’d do anything for your daughter,” George said.

Hugh felt his throat tighten. He did not want George talking about Wren. He didn’t even want him thinking about her. He risked a peripheral glance; she was maybe halfway to the command center.

“You keep saying we’re not that different,” George continued. “But you don’t really believe that.”

No matter what Hugh had said to gain George’s trust, he was well aware that there was and always would be a seminal difference between them, and it had to do with morality. Hugh would never take a life because of his own beliefs.

He realized with a tiny shock that exact conviction was what had brought George here today.

“George, this can still end well,” Hugh said. “Think of your daughter.”

“She’ll never look at me the same after this. You don’t get it.”

“Then make me understand.”

He expected George to reach for him, to pull him back into the clinic, where he could barricade the door and use Hugh as a bargaining chip. Or kill him.

“All right,” George said.

The twilight was bleeding, it was the seam between day and night. Hugh saw the gun move. He reached for his pistol, sheer habit, and remembered that he was unarmed.

But George’s gun was no longer pointed at Hugh. It was aimed at Wren—still twenty feet shy of the tent—a moving target Hugh had arrogantly believed he could keep safe.

—

WHEN HIS DAUGHTER WAS YOUNGER, George had read to her from the Bible, instead of fairy tales. Some stories, he knew, just don’t have happy endings. Better for Lil to understand that love was about sacrifice. That what looked like carnage, from a different angle, might be a crusade.

We are all capable of things we never imagined.

Well, Detective, he thought. You asked me to make you understand and I did. You and I, we’re not that different.

Not the hero and the villain, not the pro-life activist and the abortion doctor, not the cop and the killer. We are all drowning slowly in the tide of our opinions, oblivious that we are taking on water every time we open our mouths.

He wished he could tell his daughter that he realized this, now.

He pulled the trigger.

Four p.m.

AFTER HOURS OF TALKING WITH THE SHOOTER OVER A SECURE LINE, Hugh had been lulled into complacency. He had mistakenly assumed that it was possible to reason with a madman.

But then there had been another gunshot, and Hugh’s only thought was of his daughter.

When Wren was two, he had taken her along when he went down to fix a little dock that sat out behind Bex’s property, on the edge of a weed-choked pond. He was hammering treated wood into place while she sat on the grass, playing with a toy her aunt had given her. One minute she had been laughing, chattering to herself, and the next there was a splash.

Hugh hadn’t even thought. He jumped off the dock into the water, which was so murky and clogged that he couldn’t see a foot in front of him. His eyes burned as he struggled to spot anything that might be Wren. He dove over and over, his hands outstretched and spinning through weeds, until finally he brushed against something solid. He broke through the water with Wren wrapped in one arm, laid her on the dock, fitted his mouth against hers, and breathed for her until she choked up the swamp.

Hugh had screamed at Wren, who’d burst into tears. But his anger was misdirected. He was furious at himself, for being stupid enough to take his eyes off of her.

There had been a gunshot, and Hugh was in that muddy pond again, blindly trying to save his daughter, and it was all his fault.

There had been a gunshot, one that struck his sister, and he hadn’t been there.

There was a gunshot, and what if that meant he was too late, again?

Captain Quandt was immediately at his side. “McElroy,” he said. “There’s active gunfire. You know the protocol.”

The protocol was to engage rather than wait and suffer the loss of more victims. It was also risky as hell. When gunmen felt threatened, they started panicking, firing at random.

Had he been Quandt, he might well have made the same call. But Hugh hadn’t yet confessed to Quandt that his own child was inside. That this wasn’t random at all.

There had been other hostage situations that had become bloodbaths because the law enforcement agencies were too aggressive. In 2002 Chechen rebels went into a theater, taking hundreds of hostages and even killing two; Russian forces decided to pump an untested gas inside to end the standoff. They killed thirty-nine terrorists but also over a hundred hostages.

What if that happened when Quandt went in?

“It wasn’t active gunfire,” Hugh said, trying to buy time. “It was a single shot. It’s possible that the threat neutralized himself.”

“Then there’s zero risk,” Quandt pointed out. “Let’s go.” He didn’t wait for Hugh to respond, just turned on his heel to organize his team.

There had been several moments in Hugh’s experience that changed his life. The day he asked Annabelle out. The night that suicidal kid on the roof turned and gave Hugh his hand. When Wren took her first breath. This would, he knew, be another of those moments: the one that ended his career.

“No,” Hugh said, to Quandt’s back. “My daughter’s one of the hostages.”

The SWAT commander turned slowly. “What?”

“I didn’t know at first. I found out after I got here,” Hugh explained. “But I didn’t—I didn’t step down. I couldn’t.”

“You’re relieved of your position,” Quandt said flatly.

“Only my chief can do that,” Hugh said. “And I’m in too deep now with the hostage taker to walk away. I’m sorry. I know the rules. I know it’s a conflict of interest. But my God, Captain—nobody has greater incentive for this to end well than I do. You understand that, don’t you?”

“I understand that when you lied to me, to the chief, to everyone—you knew exactly what you were doing.”

“No. If I knew what I was doing, she’d be here with me.” Hugh cleared his throat and forced himself to look the commander in the eye. “Don’t make my daughter pay for my stupidity. Please,” he begged. “It’s my kid.”

He was underwater again, and flailing in the weeds. He was drowning.

Quandt stared him down. “Everyone in there,” he said, “is somebody’s kid.”

—

BEX STARED AT THE FLUORESCENT lights overhead in the hospital’s operating room, wondering if she was going to die.

She was worried. Not for herself, but for Wren, for the rest of the people in the clinic. And of course for Hugh, who shouldered this burden. He would blame himself for anything that went wrong today. Some men wear responsibility and some are worn by it; Hugh had always been the former. Even at her father’s funeral, when Hugh had been just eight, he insisted on shaking the hand of everyone who came to grieve. He was the last to leave the grave site, walking back to the parking lot with the minister. Bex had settled her sobbing mother in the car and gone back to get Hugh. “I’m the man of the house now,” he’d told her, and so she had spent the rest of her life walking behind him, trying to inconspicuously take away some of the load he carried.

It was why she had moved back home, when her mother’s grief made her turn to a bottle and neglect Hugh.

It was why she made sure that there was a female presence in Wren’s life after Annabelle was gone.

It was why she had brought Wren to the clinic.

The anesthesiologist leaned over her. “You might feel a little burning,” he said, “but then you’re going to have the best nap of your life.”

When Hugh was little, he had never wanted to go to sleep at night. She used to have to create two alternatives that gave him a choice and the sense he was in control: Do you want to walk upstairs to your room, or do you want me to carry you? Do you want to brush your teeth first, or wash your face? Either scenario ended in bedtime. But then he began to get wiser. He would ask her to read three books, and she would counter with one, and he would laugh and tell her he’d been hoping for two all along.

Even at five, he had been a negotiator.

When the anesthesia took effect, Bex was smiling.

—

JANINE COULD FEEL THE GHOSTS. They were sitting in her lap and in her arms and pulling at the hem of her dress. This building was full of babies without mothers.

She had come to get information. Intelligence. Something that could be revealed online, the way Lila Rose had done, to expose the reality of these murder centers. She was never supposed to get stuck here.

Janine had grown up on the southwest side of Chicago, where you came not from neighborhoods, but from parishes. She was from St. Christina, and she knew from the time she was a young child that a baby was a baby the moment it was conceived. At the very least, it was a human person in progress.

She was not unrealistic. She understood that abstinence wasn’t always possible, that birth control sometimes failed, but if a couple decided to engage in an activity that could potentially create a life, they should also be prepared to accept a change in their own lives. She knew, of course, that it wasn’t just a woman who was responsible for a pregnancy—although it was the woman who had to carry the baby for nine months. But nine months was a hiccup in the time line of a woman’s life. And it wasn’t the child’s fault that led to him or her being conceived. So why should he have to pay with his life?

Janine had been told she was anti-woman. That she was ridiculous. That if she didn’t want an abortion, she didn’t have to have one. But she knew that if a woman killed that same bundle of cells a few months later, there wouldn’t even be an argument. She would be vilified and put in jail for life. The only difference was the calendar.

Janine had been twelve when her mother conceived again, an accident, at age forty-three. She remembered how her parents had come home from an appointment with two new bits of knowledge: the baby was a boy, and he had one extra chromosome. The doctor had counseled her mother to terminate the pregnancy, because the baby’s life would be full of developmental and health challenges.

She’d been old enough to pick up on her parents’ fear. She had Googled Down syndrome. Half the kids who were born with Down syndrome also needed heart surgery. They had increased chances of developing leukemia and thyroid problems. By age forty, many had early Alzheimer’s. And then there were other complications: ear infections, hearing loss, skin problems, bad vision, seizures, gastrointestinal disorders.

She believed she knew everything about her baby brother before he arrived. But she didn’t know that Ben would have a belly laugh that made her start laughing, too. Or that he would be ticklish on his right foot but not his left. She didn’t know that he wouldn’t go to sleep unless Janine read him exactly three books. She knew that he would meet milestones later than other kids, that he might need help. But she didn’t know how much she would need him.

It wasn’t all rosy. There were blogs where parents talked about having kids with Up syndrome, and how they’d been given an extra blessing from God in the form of that additional chromosome. That was bullshit. It took Ben three years to be potty trained. He whined when he was tired, like any other little brother. He was bullied in school. One year, Ben had a surgery on Janine’s birthday, and her parents completely forgot to give her a cake, a party, a moment of attention.

At college, when she was president of the Students for Life club, she had plenty of conversations about the moral quicksand of abortion, and she used her brother as an example. Ben may not have been the child her parents had expected, but he was the one they got. Having a child is a terrible risk, no matter what. You might have a healthy baby who then gets a heart condition, diabetes, addicted to opioids. You might raise a kid who gets her heart broken, who miscarries her own baby, whose husband dies fighting overseas. If we are meant to only have children who never encounter difficulty in life, then no one should be born.

Had Janine’s mother done what the doctor suggested at that prenatal appointment, Ben would never have existed. She wouldn’t have seen the triumph on his face when he finally learned how to tie his own shoes, when he brought home his first friend from school. He wouldn’t have been there on the day her dog Galahad was hit by a truck, the day everything went wrong, when no one could make her stop crying and Ben just crawled into her arms and hugged her.

Now, Janine glanced at Joy, who was curled sideways in her chair, her face buried in her hands. She wished she had been standing at the fence today when Joy came into the clinic to have her abortion. She might have kept her from making the decision she had.

It was too late for Joy’s baby. But that didn’t mean it was too late for Joy.

Janine sat up a little straighter. Even Norma McCorvey changed her mind. She had been Jane Roe in Roe v. Wade. In the 1970s, when she was twenty-two, she found herself pregnant for the third time. She lived in Texas, where abortion was illegal unless the mother’s life was at risk. Her lawsuit went all the way to the Supreme Court, and of course, you know how that turned out. She became an abortion advocate, until the nineties, when she did an abrupt one-eighty. From that moment, all the way till she died in 2017, she asked the Supreme Court to overturn their decision on her case.

What led to her change of opinion? She was born again.

Janine smiled to herself.

Born again.

She didn’t think it was any coincidence that the term for letting God back into your heart had, at its core, birth.

—

IZZY SAT ON THE FLOOR beside the body of Olive Lemay. Her hands were still shaking with the effort of trying to resuscitate the woman, but she had known that there wasn’t a prayer. The gun had gone off at close range. The bullet had torn through the older woman’s heart. Even as Izzy had tried to stanch the flow of blood, she had felt Olive’s hand come up to cover hers. She had seen the fear in the woman’s eyes.

“That was a very brave thing you did,” Izzy whispered fiercely.

Olive shook her head. Her eyes held Izzy’s.

Sometimes, being a nurse doesn’t matter. Being human does.

So Izzy eased up the pressure on Olive’s chest. She grabbed Olive’s hand with both of her own and she stared into the woman’s eyes, nodding in answer to the question that hadn’t been asked.

She had been in this profession long enough to know that people sometimes seemed to need permission before they left this world.

The first death she ever saw was when she had been a nursing student, and had a patient with metastatic breast cancer. The woman was a former beauty queen, now in her fifties. She’d been in the hospital before for palliative care and for rehab after a pathological fracture. But this time, she had come back to die.

One quiet night, after her family left, Izzy had sat down beside the sleeping woman. Her head was bald from the chemo; her face was gaunt, and yet somehow it only served to make her features more arresting. Izzy stared at her, thinking of the woman she must have been, before cancer ate away at her.

Suddenly the woman’s eyes blinked open, a lucid and lovely sea green. “You’ve come to get me, haven’t you?” she said, smiling softly.

“Oh no,” Izzy replied. “You’re not going for any tests tonight.”

The woman moved her head imperceptibly. “I’m not talking to you, honey,” she said, her gaze fixed somewhere over Izzy’s shoulder.

A moment later, the woman died.

Izzy always wondered what she would have seen, had she been brave enough to turn around that night.

She wondered if she would be shot, like Olive.

She wondered how long it would be until an autopsy was done, and someone found out she was pregnant.

She wondered, if her life ended today, whether anyone would be waiting for her on the other side.

—

IF HE HAD NOT BEEN given detention by the nuns in seventh grade, Louie Ward might never have become an obstetrician. In the school library, he picked up a book that was lying on the table—a biography of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Out of sheer boredom Louie started to read. He didn’t put the book down until he was finished. Louie was convinced that this man was speaking directly to him.

He began to read everything he could that the reverend had written. Life’s most persistent and urgent question, Dr. King had said, is what are you doing for others? He read those words and thought of his mama, bleeding out on the floor.

Like his mentor, Louie wanted to be a doctor, but a different kind: an ob-gyn, because of his mother. He worked hard enough to get a full scholarship to college, and then another to medical school.

When he was a resident, he came in contact with multiple women who had unplanned, unwanted pregnancies. As a practicing Catholic, he believed life started at conception, so he referred these patients to other doctors, other places. Much later in his career he would learn that although 97 percent of doctors had encountered a patient who wanted to terminate a pregnancy, only 14 percent performed abortions themselves. When the gap was that great, it was not like abortions stopped. They just got done unsafely.

One Sunday, Louie’s priest was giving a homily about the parable of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke. A traveler, beaten and left for dead on the side of the road, was passed by a priest and a Levite—neither of whom stopped. Finally, a Samaritan offered his help, even though historically Samaritans and Jews were enemies.

On the day before Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed, he had talked about that parable. He considered why the priest and the Levite might have walked past the beaten man—maybe they thought he was faking; maybe they were worried for their own safety. But most of all, he mused, the reason they passed was because they were thinking of what would happen to themselves if they stopped—not what would happen to that man if they didn’t.

Louie knew in that instant, he had to be the Samaritan. So many of the women he met who were seeking abortions were, like him, southerners of color. These were the women who had raised him. These were his neighbors, his friends, his own mother. If he didn’t interrupt his own journey to help them with theirs, who would?

It was the one truly miraculous moment of Dr. Louie Ward’s life.

At that moment Louie realized why his mama had gone to see Sebby Cherise. It wasn’t because she was having the child of a prominent married white man. It was because she had been protecting the child she already had, at the expense of the one she hadn’t wanted to conceive. This was a variation on a theme he had heard from patients: I have a child with a disability; I don’t have the time to parent another one. I can barely feed my son; what will I do with a second baby? I already work three jobs and take care of my family—there isn’t any more of me to go around.

So although Louie still went to Mass like clockwork, he also became an abortion provider. He flew several times a month to offer his services at women’s clinics. The only person who didn’t actually know what he did for a living was his grandmama.

She was in her nineties by the time Louie went back home to confess. He told her about the runner who had worked her whole life to secure a spot on the Olympic team, and then found herself pregnant after a condom broke. He told her about the woman who learned, in an opioid treatment program, that she was twelve weeks along.

He told her about a lady from a small, narrow-minded place who had been so blinded by the sun of a respected married man that she believed he would support her and claim their child as his own, only to learn that wasn’t how the world worked. They both knew who Louie was talking about. Grandmama, he said. I think Jesus would understand why I do what I do. I hope you can, too.

As he expected, his grandmama started to cry. I lost my baby and my grandbaby, she said after a long moment. Maybe now some other woman won’t.

In fact the only objection his grandmama had had to his career was that Louie might be killed by an anti-abortion activist. Louie knew that his name had been published on a website, along with other doctors who performed abortions, with information about where he lived and worked. He had known George Tiller, a doctor who’d been murdered while he was at church. Dr. Tiller had been wearing a protective vest at the time, but the gunman had shot him in the head.

Louie refused to put on a vest. The way he saw it, the minute he did, they had won. And yet, every morning he had to run the gauntlet of protesters. He would sit in his car for an extra minute, taking a deep breath, steeling himself for the vitriol and the love bombers—We’re praying for you, Dr. Ward. Have a blessed day! He would think of George Tiller and David Gunn and John Britton and Barnett Slepian, all killed by activists who were not satisfied to simply stand in a line and hurl insults.

Louie would count to ten, say an Our Father, and then in one smooth movement, gather his briefcase and exit the car. He’d hit the power lock while he was walking, face forward, eyes on the ground, refusing to engage.

Mostly.

There was one anti, a middle-aged white man, who repeatedly called out, “Sinful Negro baby killer!” Louie had ignored him, until one day he yelled, “Do I have to call you a nigger to get a rise out of you?”

That—well. That stopped Louie dead in his tracks.

“What part of me is most upsetting to you?” Louie asked calmly. “The fact that I am African American? Or the fact that I perform abortions?”

“The abortions,” the man said.

“Then what does my race have to do with anything?”

The protestor shrugged. “It doesn’t. I just throw that in.”

Louie almost had to admire the man’s scorched earth tactics.

There was only one reason he got out of his car every damn morning: the women he treated, who had to walk through that same gauntlet. How could he be any less brave than they were?

The antis wanted the women who chose abortions to feel isolated, the only people in the universe who had ever made such a selfish decision. What Louie wanted, for every woman who walked through the doors of the Center, was to make her understand she was not alone, and never would be. The most ardent antis didn’t realize how many women they knew who’d had an abortion. Wipe away the stigma and all you were left with was your neighbor, your teacher, your grocery clerk, your landlady.

He imagined what it felt like for them—to have made a decision that came at a colossal emotional and financial cost—and then to have that decision called into question. Not to mention the implication that they were not capable of managing their own healthcare. Where were the protesters at cancer centers, for example, urging chemotherapy patients to steer clear of the risks of toxins? Women were capable of taking aspirin if they had a headache, and the intrinsic risk of aspirin was far greater than that of any of the abortion medications that currently existed. If a woman chose a medication abortion, why did the mifepristone have to be taken in front of a doctor, as if she were an inpatient in a psychiatric ward who couldn’t be relied on to swallow a pill?

Louie believed that those white men with their signs and slogans were not really there for the unborn, but there for the women who carried them. They couldn’t control women’s sexual independence. To them, this was the next best thing.

Louie shifted and cried out as pain stabbed through his leg. The tourniquet had slowed the bleeding, until the shooter had—in a fit of pique—kicked him hard in the spot where the bullet had entered.

It was hell being a physician but being too injured to treat the others who’d been hurt. That had fallen to the other medical professional trapped here—the nurse, Izzy. He hadn’t worked with her before, but that wasn’t unprecedented. Vonita, the clinic owner, employed a rotating parade of healthcare professionals brave or stupid enough to show up every day in spite of the threats.

Had employed. Past tense.

He closed his eyes, fighting the feelings that rose in him.

She hadn’t been the only casualty. Izzy had tried—desperately and fruitlessly—to save the life of Olive, the older woman. This was true collateral damage: clearly a woman in her late sixties wasn’t at the clinic to terminate a pregnancy, but she had still been on the receiving end of the shooter’s rage. Izzy now drew a cotton drape over the body. At Louie’s moan of pain she turned to check the binding around his thigh. “I’m all right,” he said, trying to get her to stop fussing, when to his surprise she did. She bolted a few feet to the left and threw up in a trash can.

One of the other women—his last patient, Joy (formerly fifteen weeks along and now, Louie thought with satisfaction, un-pregnant) handed Izzy a tissue from a box on a table in the waiting room. The shooter looked at Izzy in disgust, but didn’t speak. He was too busy tending to his own injury. Izzy wiped her mouth and then returned her attention to Louie’s thigh. “I’m that bad off, huh?” he said wryly.

She looked up at him, her cheeks flushed. “No, sir. I don’t think he caused any major damage when he kicked you. Any additional major damage,” she amended.

Louie looked down at her hands, pressing gently around the wound. It hurt like hell. “How far along are you?” he asked.

He waited until she looked up at him. “How did you know?”

Louie raised an eyebrow.

“Twelve weeks,” Izzy said.

He watched her hand steal to her abdomen, her palm a shield.

“You’re gonna get out of here,” he promised. “You and your partner are going to have a beautiful bouncing baby.”

She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes.

Louie thought of all the times he’d administered what he called “verbicaine”—just chatting to ease the women who were so tense about what was going to happen. He would ask if a woman made her grits sweet or savory. If she’d listened to Beyoncé’s latest album. What sorority she belonged to. He prided himself on being able to get any woman relaxed, while he calmly and professionally performed the procedure. What he heard most often from his patients was “You mean you’re already finished?”

But his reassurance had not worked on Izzy.

Izzy didn’t believe him when he said she was going to get out of here.

Because, frankly, neither did he.

—

JOY HAD TOLD ONLY ONE person about her pregnancy—her best friend, a waitress at the Departure Lounge, a martini bar in the Jackson airport. Rosie had been the one who stood beside her in the ladies’ room, counting down a timer on her phone, while they watched the little plus sign appear on the stick. “What are you going to do?” Rosie had asked, and Joy hadn’t answered.

A week later, she made an appointment at the Center. That same day she told Rosie she had miscarried. The way Joy figured, this was just one minor inaccuracy, a small erroneous footnote. The outcome would be the same.

Even though she knew Rosie would have driven her for her procedure, Joy wanted and needed to do it alone. She had been stupid enough to get herself into this mess; she would be smart enough to get herself out.

The first night that he came into the bar, Joy had noticed him right away. He’d been tall, lean, and wearing a suit that fit beautifully; his hair was gray at the temples. Joy had looked at his hands—you could tell a lot about a person from their hands—and his were long-fingered, strong. He looked a little bit like President Obama, if President Obama had been so sad that he sought refuge in the bottom of a bucket of gin martinis.

When Joy came on duty, it was the late shift, and she was the only staff in the lounge—it was cheaper to train the waitresses to mix drinks and lock up for the night than to pay additional employees. She refilled the nuts for a gay couple drinking Negronis and printed out the tab for a woman whose flight was being called. Then she went over to the man, whose eyes were closed. “Can I get you a refill?”

When he glanced up at her, it was like looking into a mirror.

Only someone who has been there—trapped in an invisible prison, desperate to escape—can recognize that expression in another. When he nodded, Joy brought him another drink. And another. Three more customers came and went, while she kept an eye on the man at the high-top. She knew he wasn’t in the mood to talk; she had been a cocktail waitress long enough to read those clues. There were some people who wanted to pour out their troubles as you poured their spirits. There were some who texted furiously on their phones, avoiding eye contact. There were the handsy ones, who grabbed her ass as she walked by and pretended it was an accident. But this man only wanted to lose himself.

When he had been there for three hours she stood beside his table. “I don’t mean to bother you,” Joy said, “but when’s your flight?”

He knocked back his drink past the fence of his teeth. “It landed. Four hours ago.”

She wondered if Mississippi was his starting point or his destination. Either way, there was something outside this building that he couldn’t face.

When it came time to close up, he paid with cash and gave her a tip equal to the amount of the bill. “Can I get you a cab?” she asked.

“Can’t I stay here?”

“Nope.” Joy shook her head. “What’s your name?”

“Can’t tell you,” he slurred.

“Why? You in the CIA?”

“No, ma’am,” he said. “But this is not appropriate behavior for a representative of the court.”

So he was a lawyer, Joy thought. Maybe he had lost a big case, something he’d been working on for months. Maybe his client had perjured herself on the stand. There were a hundred scenarios, and she’d seen them all on Law & Order. “Lucky for you, this isn’t a courtroom,” Joy said. “Although there is a bar.”

He smiled at that. As she turned away to close out the cash register, he tapped her arm. “Joe,” he said after a moment.

She held out her hand. “Joy.”

He peered at her with pale blue eyes, so arresting in the face of a Black man, some historical, genealogical evolution that was more likely due to a moment of force than to passion. He wore the scars of his past on his face, Joy realized. Just like she did.

“Y’all don’t look very joyous,” he remarked.

That’s when she made the decision that would change the course of her life. Joy, who never invited anyone to her apartment, decided that this man needed to sleep off his drink, and start over tomorrow. She decided to give him the second chance she never had gotten.

She locked up, and by then, Joe was passed out, his cheek pressed to the polished wood. Rolling her eyes, she found a wheelchair three gates down and half-lifted, half-dragged Joe into it. That was how she got him to her car, too. By the time they collapsed in a tumbled heap onto the couch in her living room, she was sweating and exhausted. Joe started to snore immediately.

When she tried to extricate herself, though, his arms tightened on her. He stroked her hair. He pulled her against him.

Joy did not even know his last name, or what had brought him to Jackson. But it had been so long since she’d been held, just held. And it had been even longer since she’d felt needed. And so against her better judgment, she’d lain down to sleep with her head on his chest. She made his heartbeat her lullaby.

It was sometime in the dead of night that she woke up to find herself being watched. They were pressed together on the narrow couch and Joe’s eyes were soberly focused on hers. “You are a good person,” he said after a moment.

He wouldn’t say that if he knew how she had grown up, what she had done to survive.

When he kissed her, Joy wanted to believe that her conscience would cause her a moment of hesitation, yet that wasn’t true. She was on the Pill for period cramps, but even so, this was a stranger. She should have used a condom. Instead, she grabbed on to his shoulders and made him the center of her storm. And even though it was grief he poured into her, it was better than being empty.

Afterward, they were both wide awake and dead sober. “I shouldn’t have—” Joe began, but Joy didn’t want to hear it. She couldn’t stand being someone’s mistake again. She went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face. When she came back out, Joe was dressed in his suit. “I called an Uber,” he said. “I, uh, got your address off an envelope.” He handed her an electric bill that had been on the coffee table with yesterday’s mail. He gestured awkwardly toward the bathroom. “Could I … ?”

Joy nodded, stepping aside so that he could pass. She told him where he might find aspirin, and he thanked her and closed the door.

Joe returned to the living room. He was tall, she realized, something she had not seen when he was slumped over a table. “I’m not the kind of person who—” she started, but he interrupted.

“I’ve never done this before.”

“Chalk it up to the alcohol,” Joy said.

“Temporary insanity.”

A car horn honked twice.

“Thank you, Miz Joy,” Joe said formally. “For showing me a kindness.”

Joy felt like she had shown him her very soul, disfigured as it might be. She looked away as he shrugged into his jacket and presumably out of her life. As she showered that morning, she tried to convince herself that she wasn’t the slut her foster mother had always called her; that she was entitled to creature comfort; that they were both consenting adults. She went to her classes, and then to her afternoon job at the college library, and then to her shift at the Departure Lounge, where she found herself looking for Joe although she knew he would not be there.

Until one night he was. That night, he hadn’t gotten drunk. He had waited until Joy’s shift was over, and accompanied her back to her apartment, where they made love and then shared a pint of ice cream in bed. She learned that Joe was not a lawyer, but a judge. He told her how his favorite moments on the bench were adoptions, when a foster kid got a permanent home. He stroked her hair and said he wished she’d been one of them.

He came back two more times, admitting that he was inventing business in Jackson just to see her again. Joy couldn’t remember a time that someone had run toward her, instead of away. She let him quiz her before one of her midterms and cook her a big breakfast before the test.

When you are used to fending for yourself, being taken care of is a drug. Joy became addicted. She texted Joe funny signs she passed on the way to work: the Baptist church with the live Nativity that advertised COME SEE OUR ASSES; the gaily flashing STOP—THREE WAY!; the Taco Bell billboard that said IN QUESO EMERGENCY, PRAY TO CHEESES. Joe wrote her back with daily Darwin Awards, anonymously describing the memorable defendants in his courtroom. When he showed up unexpectedly, she called in sick to work at the library so that she could spend as much time with him as he could spare. He was fifteen years older than she was, and sometimes she wondered if she was compensating for her lack of a father, but then she would realize there was nothing paternal about their relationship. She guardedly began to wonder if this was the moment that her terrible luck turned.

She should have known better.

Biology and evolution and social mores allowed Joe to leave; Joy was the one stuck with the pregnancy. Even though there had been two of them in that bed. Joy realized, in retrospect, she should have expected this. Life had repeatedly served her a big old side dish of miserable anytime she had a taste of anything good.

She had one more year of classes before she graduated with her bachelor’s degree—a degree she had fought for by scrimping and saving to pay for her credits. She worked two jobs already in order to make that happen. There was not a world in which she could take care of a baby, too.

That was Joy’s reasoning, as she sat in the bathroom at the library and whispered answers to the woman who scheduled her appointment at the Center.

Name. Address. Date of birth. First day of your last menstrual period. Have you been pregnant before?

Have you had any bleeding or spotting since your last period?

Are you breast-feeding now?

Do you have a history of uterine abnormalities?

Have you ever had asthma? Lung problems? Heart problems? Stroke?

And a dozen more questions, until: Is there anything else we should know about you?

Yes, Joy thought. I am pathologically unlucky. I’m perfectly healthy, except for this one thing that never should have happened to me.

The woman explained that because of the state of Mississippi’s requirements, an abortion was a two-day procedure. She asked if Joy had health insurance, and when she said no, the woman said Medicaid didn’t cover the cost. Joy would have to scrape together $600, if she could get here before she was eleven weeks, six days pregnant. Otherwise, the price jumped to $725 till thirteen weeks, six days. After that, it was eight hundred bucks, till the sixteenth week. After that, the procedure couldn’t be done.

Joy was already ten weeks pregnant.

She texted Joe, saying she needed to speak to him, but she didn’t want to tell him over text that this had happened. He didn’t answer.

She did some math in her head, and scheduled an appointment for a week and a half out. But even after skipping class to double her shifts at the bar and the library, she didn’t have enough money by the deadline. So she worked even harder, hoping to schedule an appointment at thirteen weeks. But her carburetor died and she had to pay for it or risk losing both her jobs. Before she knew it she was fourteen and a half weeks pregnant and running out of time. This time she called Joe, instead of texting. When a woman answered, she hung up the phone.

Joy pawned her laptop to get the cash, and rescheduled.

If she’d been richer, she wouldn’t have been here today.

She wouldn’t have been getting an abortion when a madman stormed the Center and started shooting.

It was just another layer of icing on the shitcake of her life.

This morning, when she had walked past the protesters, one of the women yelled that Joy was selfish. Well, she was. She had worked her ass off to get somewhere after aging out of the foster care program. She had struggled to pay for classes at college. She was determined to not wind up dependent on anyone.

The phone rang. And rang and rang. Joy slanted her gaze to the gunman to see if he would pick it up, but he was struggling—unsuccessfully—to tie a bandage around his bleeding hand.

It’s crazy, what puts you on a collision course with someone. You might wind up in an airport, drunk. You might be too poor to pick the appointment date you wanted. You might have the bad fortune to be born to an addict, or to be bounced from foster home to foster home.

What had brought this shooter here today with his gun? Joy had heard bits of conversation when he was on the phone with the police outside. He wanted revenge because his own daughter had come here for an abortion. Apparently she hadn’t told him what she was going to do.

Joy hadn’t told Joe, either, but then, he hadn’t returned her messages.

“What the fuck is your problem?” George asked, looming over her.

Startled, Joy pressed herself back against the chair. After what they had done to him—after what she had seen him do to Olive—she was terrified. She felt sweat trickle down her back. She had not felt this way—paralyzed—since she was eight. Back then the villain hadn’t had a gun, just fists. But he had still towered over her; he’d still had all the power.

Joy wondered, again, about George’s daughter.

She wondered why the girl had wanted an abortion.

She wondered if the girl was watching the news, if she felt responsible.

She wondered what it felt like to have an act of violence committed because someone loved you too much, instead of too little.

—

WHEN SHE WAS LITTLE, WREN had believed her father knew everything. And she had asked him thousands of questions: Are there more leaves in the world, or blades of grass?

Why can’t we breathe underwater?

If your eyes are blue do you see everything in blue?

How do you know you’re real and not someone else’s dream?

How do you get wax in your ears?

Where does the water go when you let the bathtub drain?

Why don’t cows talk?

Once she had asked, Are you going to die?

Hopefully not for a long time, he had answered.

Am I going to die?

Not if I can help it.

There were so many things she had not asked her father, that now she wished she had. What it is like to see someone die in front of your eyes?

What do you do when you realize you couldn’t save them?

Wren lifted her gaze to the man she had stabbed in the hand, the one who had tried to shoot her. The one who had shot her aunt. The one who had killed Olive.

He was wrapping gauze around his bleeding palm, and doing a really shitty job of it. When the gun had gone off, at first Wren couldn’t hear anything, and she thought for a second she had actually been shot and this was what death was. But the silence had been her eardrums shutting down, and the blood all over her had come from Olive. By the time Wren could hear again, the room bleating in fits and starts, she didn’t want to.

The tattered name ripped from Olive’s lips, for anyone who would be a messenger.

Janine keening.

Dr. Ward moaning in a yellow haze of pain as Izzy checked his tourniquet.

And a tiny, high whistle that it took Wren a while to figure out was coming from the center of her own body, the sound of fear vibrating through the tuning fork of her skeleton.

She stole a glance at the shooter. He clumsily tied off the bandage, using his teeth.

Just watch. Wren would be the girl who had come to a women’s health clinic to get birth control, but still managed to die a virgin.

Suddenly the man lunged forward. Izzy shifted slightly, as if she were willing to throw herself between Wren and the shooter, but Wren would be damned if she let that happen again. She twisted at the last minute so that when he grabbed her forearm and jerked her upright, Izzy couldn’t get in the way.

A small cry escaped Wren’s clenched teeth, and she hated herself for showing any weakness. She forced herself to look him in the eye even though her knees were knocking together.

Bring it, you motherfucker, she thought.

“Let’s go, girl,” he said.

She could smell the cellar of his breath.

Where was he taking her? Where was he taking her?

He glanced at the others. “Do not move. If any of you move I’ll make sure you never move again.” As if for punctuation, he glanced down at Olive’s body.

“Let go of me,” Wren yelled, actively fighting. She tried to pull out of his grasp, but he was too strong. “Let go of me!” she shrieked, and she lifted her foot to kick him, but he twisted her around roughly, his arm pressing against her windpipe.

“Do not,” he said, “tempt me.”

He increased his pressure on her throat until she saw stars.

Stars.

And then it all started to go black.

Suddenly he let her go. Wren fell to her hands and knees, sucking in air. She hated that she was at this man’s feet, like a dog he could kick to the curb. “My dad is never gonna let you out of here alive,” she gasped.

“Well, too bad your dad isn’t with us.”

“Oh yeah?” Wren said. “Who do you think that is on the phone?”

For just a moment, everything stopped, like it does at the apex of the roller coaster when you are caught between heaven and earth.

But then, you plummet down.

The shooter smiled. A terrible, reptile smile. Wren realized she did not have the upper hand after all.

“Well,” the shooter said. “It’s my lucky day.”

—

HUGH LET THE PHONE RING five more times and then slammed it down. He was electric with frustration. The hostages had not come out. George was not answering. Hugh’s decision an hour ago to cut the Wi-Fi and block all phone signals except the landline had cost him the ability to text Wren to see if she was all right—or if she had been the one who was shot.

It seemed like yesterday that he had driven Wren to kindergarten in his truck. As they turned in to the half-moon driveway of the school, he would tell her to put on her jet pack, and Wren would wriggle into her oversize knapsack. He’d slow to a stop. Launching Wren, he would announce, and she would leap out of the car, as if she were setting foot on a new and unexplored planet.

After Annabelle had left them, for several months, Wren had asked when she was coming home. She’s not, Hugh had told her. It’s just you and me now.

Then one night, Hugh had gotten called to a domestic that was spiraling out of control. Bex had come to stay with Wren, who was inconsolable. When he got home at 3:30 A.M., his daughter was still awake and sobbing: I thought you were gone.

Hugh had pulled her into his arms. I will never leave you, he promised. Never.

Who would have guessed it might be the other way around?

He felt a shadow fall over him, and looked up to see the SWAT team commander standing shoulder to shoulder with the chief of police. “You should have told me about your daughter,” Chief Monroe said.

Hugh nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“You know I can’t keep you in charge, son.”

Hugh felt heat spread beneath his collar and he rubbed his hand on the back of his neck. His cellphone—the one he had been using to communicate with George Goddard—started to buzz on the card table he was using as a desk. He glanced at the incoming number. “It’s him.”

Quandt looked at the chief and then cursed underneath his breath. Chief Monroe picked up the phone and handed it to Hugh.

—

IN 2006, IN THE STATE of Mississippi, sixteen-year-old Rennie Gibbs was charged with “depraved heart” murder when she delivered a stillborn at thirty-six weeks. Although the umbilical cord had been wrapped around the baby’s neck, the prosecutor claimed the stillbirth was caused by Gibbs’s cocaine use, due to trace elements of illegal drugs in the baby’s bloodstream.

The prosecutor was Willie Cork, the same showboat who had been in Beth’s hospital room, charging her with murder.

Beth glanced up from the article she was reading over her public defender’s shoulder. “Is it true?” she asked. “The prosecutor did this before to someone else?”

“Don’t read this,” Mandy said, closing her laptop.

“Why not?”

“Because looking up prior cases when you’re in legal trouble is like going to WebMD when you have a cold. You’ll wind up convinced it’s cancer.” She sighed. “Willie has major aspirations for the next election. He wants to paint himself as someone who’s tough on crime—even for the pre-born.”

Beth swallowed. “Did she go to jail? Rennie Gibbs, I mean?”

“No. She was indicted by a grand jury, but the evidence was questionable. In 2014 the case was dismissed.”

“That means mine could be, too, right?”

Mandy looked at her. “That means Willie Cork needs a win.”

Beth was scared and overwhelmed. She had a hundred questions, and the answer to all of them was probably something she didn’t want to hear. She felt tears climb the ladder of her throat, and she turned on her side, closing her eyes, hoping that Mandy wouldn’t notice.

She may have fallen asleep. When she heard Willie Cork’s voice, she thought at first she was having a nightmare. “What the hell are you doing out here?” he said, and Beth looked out from beneath her lashes to see that the door was open, and he was chewing out the cop who Mandy had convinced to stand outside, so that they could have privacy. “You left them in there alone? Get out. I’m having you reassigned,” the prosecutor swore, “and I’m waiting until your replacement gets here.”

She heard his voice in a one-sided phone conversation with, she guessed, someone at the police station. Mandy got up and stood in the open doorway, waiting for him to hang up. Was it weird that her public defender had sat there the whole time Beth was asleep? Had it been to avoid leaving Beth alone in a room with some male cop she didn’t know?

“What are you doing here?” Mandy hissed at Willie Cork.

“I could ask you the same, since I’m guessing that cop didn’t wander outside by himself.” He crossed past Beth’s bed and picked up a silver pen that was sitting on top of the radiator, something she hadn’t noticed. “To answer your question, I left this behind by accident.” He turned it over in his hand. “Montblanc. My daddy gave it to me when I graduated from law school.”

Mandy rolled her eyes. “Keep your voice down. She’s sleeping. And you left it behind by accident? Come on. You planted that so you could come back and interrogate my client without her lawyer present.”

“Now, now, Mandy. You’re soundin’ like a conspiracy theorist.”

“Says the slick son-of-a-bitch who plans to climb to the district attorney’s office by trampling on a frightened, innocent girl.”

If Beth had had any thoughts of revealing she wasn’t sleeping, they vanished. She concentrated on making her breathing even, on not rattling the handcuff against the bed rail.

“Dismiss the charges,” Mandy said quietly. “I’m doing you a favor, Willie. Don’t ruin a girl’s life because you want to get ahead in yours. You’re only going to wind up embarrassed, like you did before.”

Rennie Gibbs, Beth thought.

“You’re trying to elevate the status of a fetus to personhood,” Mandy continued, “and we don’t have that law in Mississippi.”

“Yet,” the prosecutor answered.

Beth had been too nervous to really look at him during the arraignment, but now she did, peeking through the seams of her lids. Willie Cork wasn’t much older than her public defender, but he already had threads of silver at the temples of his black hair. He probably dyed them that way, just to look the part.

“Mississippi has a long history of violence against people who’ve been silenced,” he said.

Mandy laughed. “Willie, surely even you aren’t dumb enough to try to play the race card on a Black woman.”

“Unborn children are already part of the fabric of legal documents. Why, my granddaddy made sure I had a trust before I was even a glimmer in my daddy’s eye.”

“You know there’s a world of difference between the legal rights of an unborn child and the constitutional rights of a living human being,” Mandy whispered, heatedly. “The Constitution may protect liberty and privacy interests, but the Supreme Court has determined that those protections don’t take effect until birth, and that prior to birth, a fetus is not a person. States may give a fetus legal rights, but that doesn’t make it a person.”

Beth’s head was spinning. These were a lot of words, and most of them she didn’t really understand. What she didn’t get was why, if this was all about a fetus, she was the one who was handcuffed. She stifled the hysterical laugh bubbling: after all she had gone through to not be responsible for a baby, it turned out she still was.

“I’m merely elaborating on a time-honored legal tradition of allowing those who don’t have a voice to have one in court. You see it every day, when a guardian ad litem is appointed to speak for children, or people with disabilities. We have laws to protect the vulnerable in this country who can’t protect themselves. Like, for example, your client’s baby.”

“My client’s fetus,” Mandy clarified, “which relied on its host to survive.”

“And if that host does something to cause harm, there should be consequences. If she had been attacked by someone when she was pregnant and lost the baby, wouldn’t you want her attacker pursued? You know if that was the case, you’d be fighting as hard as I am for justice. We’re not going to exclude the perpetrator just because her womb happens to house the child.”

“What about the mother’s rights?” asked Mandy.

“Can’t have it both ways, darlin’,” Willie Cork said. “You don’t get to call her a mother if you aren’t willing to call what’s inside her a baby.”

They were not even whispering anymore, and both lawyers had their backs turned toward Beth. It was as if they had forgotten she was the root of this argument.

It wouldn’t have been the first time.

The reason she was here, now, was that everyone else seemed to have the right to make decisions about her—except Beth herself. She was so damn tired of being a bystander in her own life.

“You don’t have a case,” Mandy challenged.

“Don’t I, though?” the prosecutor slipped his phone from his pocket, punched the screen a couple of times, and started to read aloud. “Mississippi code annotated 97-3-19: The killing of a human being without the authority of law by any means or in any manner shall be murder in the following cases: Subsection A—when done with deliberate design to effect the death of the person killed … or Subsection D—when done with deliberate design to effect the death of an unborn child. And of course, there’s precedent.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Purvi Patel,” Willie Cork began. “Twenty sixteen. She took the same pills your client did to terminate her pregnancy, at twenty-four weeks. Got them from a Hong Kong online pharmacy. When the baby died after birth, she was charged with a Class A felony. She was convicted and sentenced to twenty years for feticide and child neglect.”

“The evidence wasn’t clear in the Patel case that the baby was born alive,” Mandy argued. “And the conviction was overturned.”

“Bei Bei Shuai drank rat poison to commit suicide when she was thirty-three weeks pregnant. Her baby died, but she didn’t, and she was charged with murder and attempted feticide and sentenced to thirty years,” the prosecutor replied.

“And the charges against her were dropped after she pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and spent a year in custody.” Mandy folded her arms. “Every case you’ve cited has been thrown out or dismissed.”

“Regina McKnight,” the prosecutor said. “Successfully prosecuted in South Carolina for homicide following a stillbirth caused by prenatal ingestion of crack cocaine. She got a twelve-year sentence.”

“Are you kidding? McKnight wasn’t even trying to have an abortion,” Mandy argued.

“You’re not making your point here, darlin’. You’re making mine. If those women were charged with murder and intent wasn’t even involved, imagine how easy it’s gonna be to lock up your girl.”

The door swung open, and a new cop entered. “You will not leave this room,” Willie Cork ordered. “Not even if the building is on fire around you. And you,” he said to Mandy, “well, good luck, Counselor.”

Mandy faced him. “As long as Roe v. Wade stands, my client had every right to terminate her pregnancy.”

“Yes,” the prosecutor agreed. “But in Mississippi, she didn’t have the right to do it by herself. That, my dear, is murder.”

Murder. Beth flinched, and her handcuff scraped the rail. Both attorneys whirled around at the same moment, realizing she was awake.

“I—I’m sorry,” Beth stammered.

“Little late for that, isn’t it?” Willie Cork said, and he sailed out the door.

—

GEORGE GODDARD’S VOICE CRACKLED THROUGH Hugh’s phone. “I believe,” he said, “that I have something of yours.”

He knows, Hugh thought. He knows about Wren.

Hugh shivered, even though it had to be ninety degrees outside. He flicked his eyes over the small group huddled around his command center and nodded. Quandt slipped on a pair of headphones to listen in. “George,” Hugh said evenly, not taking the bait. “I heard a shot. What happened? Are you hurt?”

Remind the hostage taker you’re on his side.

“Those bitches tried to shoot me.”

Hugh glanced at the SWAT commander. “So you weren’t the one who fired the gun?”

“I had to. They stabbed me.”

Hugh closed his eyes. “Do you need medical help?” he asked, although he really didn’t give a fuck if George bled to death.

“I’ll live.”

Quandt raised one brow.

“What about … everyone else? Did someone get hurt?”

“The old lady,” George said.

“Does she need medical attention?”

There was a flicker of silence. “Not anymore,” George said.

Hugh thought about Bex, about all that blood. “Anyone else, George?”

“I didn’t shoot your daughter, if that’s what you’re asking,” George said. “Now I know why you didn’t send in the SWAT team.”

“No!” Hugh said quickly. “Look. I didn’t know she was in there when you and I started talking.”

Find a bridge between you.

“She never even told me she was going to the clinic,” Hugh added. “You know what that’s like.”

Hugh held his breath. He hated talking this way about Wren. No, he hadn’t known she was going to the clinic. Yes, he hated himself for the fact that she had asked Bex to take her, and not him. But he didn’t blame Wren for not feeling comfortable. He blamed his own parenting, for not making it clear that no question, no request, nothing was off-limits.

How many parents had he sat with in their own living rooms, while the medical examiner’s team removed the body of their teenage child behind them, raw with the marks of a noose or the cuts of a razor? I didn’t know, they would say, dazed. She never told me.

Hugh never said it out loud, but sometimes thought: Well, did you ask?

And he had. He would poke his head into Wren’s room and say, Anyone picking on you at school? Anything you want to talk about?

She would look up from her homework. You mean other than the pipe bomb I’m building in my closet? Then she would grin. No suicidal thoughts, Dad. All clear.

But there were a hundred mines a teenager could step on daily. One of them had slipped through his defense.

Suddenly everything in Hugh went still. Yes, George had a vital piece of information now—that one of his hostages was related to the negotiator. He thought it gave him an advantage. But what if Hugh could use the knowledge of that information to tip the scales in his own favor?

“Listen,” Hugh said. “Both our kids snuck around behind our backs. You couldn’t stop your daughter, George. But you were able to stop mine. You saved her from making a terrible mistake.”

It was not true. Wren had not gone to the Center to get an abortion. Hugh knew this. But George didn’t.

“You know why I want this to be over, George?” Hugh said.

“You’re worried about your kid.”

“Yeah. But I also want to meet my grandchild, one day. Because of you, that’s possible.”

Silence.

“It’d be like getting a second chance. I’m a single parent, George. Just like you. I may not always have been the best father, but I tried to be. You know?”

There was a huff of response on the other end of the telephone line, which Hugh took as assent.

“But I’m also worried about what she thinks of me. I want her to be proud. I want her to think I did everything I possibly could for her.”

“We can’t both be the hero.”

“Hero is just a label,” Hugh said. “But honor—that’s a legacy. You have a chance, George. A chance to redeem yourself. To do what’s right.”

He was taking a risk, raising the specter of integrity to a man who had only hours ago gone off the deep end due to a question about his reputation. But then it stood to reason that a person whose dignity had been questioned might crave respect. So much so that he would be willing to surrender in order to get it.

“It’s not honorable to quit,” George said, but Hugh could hear it—the weakening of bonds between the syllables of his conviction. The what if.

“Depends on the circumstan a Clrgued. “And the conviction was overturned.”

“Bei Bei Shuai drank rat poison to commit suicide when she was thirty-three weeks pregnant. Her baby died, but she didn’t, and she was charged with murder and attempted feticide and sentenced to thirty years,” the prosecutor replied.

“And the charges against her were dropped after she pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and spent a year in custody.” Mandy folded her arms. “Every case you’ve cited has been thrown out or dismissed.”

“Regina McKnight,” the prosecutor said. “Successfully prosecuted in South Carolina for homicide following a stillbirth caused by prena

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Epigraph

Five p.m.

Four p.m.