Page 142 of The Final Cut

I open the door.

She is still there, sitting in the front pew with a straight spine, hands clasped loosely in her lap rather than clenched in prayer. She has Reva’s hair, dark with threads of silver. Reva’s mouth too, though softened by age and grief. Around the eyes, the resemblance is worse. Clear enough that it makes me angry on Reva’s behalf, because how the hell is a girl supposed to survive burying a face only to find it waiting in a hospital chapel fifteen years later?

Marisol turns her head. She knows me before I speak.

“Shiloh Lafitte,” she says.

My hand stays on the back of the last pew. “That saves time spent on introductions.”

“Cal talked about you.”

“Did he?”

Her mouth trembles slightly. She controls it. “He said you made Reva laugh when she was trying very hard not to.”

That goes under my ribs and twists.

I walk down the aisle slowly, stopping two pews behind her because crowding a grieving mother, dead or alive, is bad manners, and because I am angry enough that distance seems wise.

“Marisol Hart,” I say. “Back from the dead.”

She closes her eyes for a second.

When she opens them, she looks older. “I know what you must think.”

“I doubt that.”

“No,” she says softly. “Perhaps you don’t.”

The charm is usually there when I need it. A reflex. A pretty blade. Tonight I can’t seem to find it—but then, I’m not looking very hard.

“You can talk to me now,” I tell her. “You can give me enough truth to make things easier when your daughters are ready to look at you. Or you can keep your privacy, and I will use every ounce of influence I have to make sure neither of those girls ever has to find you by accident again.”

Pain crosses her face. She deserves that little cruelty, even if I’m not particularly proud of dishing it out.

I hold on to it, anyway.

“You would keep them from me?”

“I would keep anyone away who hurts them, particularly from Reva.” I shift my weight a little, lean a bit closer. “Reva is mine.”

“I am their mother.”

“Mmm. And one of them thought you were dead while the other learned obedience from the woman who ordered you dead.” My voice stays low because volume is cheap, and I want every word to arrive clean.

Marison laughs a little. “I thought you were the nice one.”

“You don’t get the nice version, sorry.” I shrug.

Marisol’s hands tighten in her lap. “I guess I don’t deserve the nice version.”

“No, ma’am. You do not.”

She flinches at ma’am, which gives me more satisfaction than it should.

For a while, only the chapel’s small electric candles move, flickering without heat at the front of the room. Marisol looks at them as if there is an answer hidden in the cheap plastic light. Then she exhales and turns fully on the pew, facing me with Reva’s eyes and a dead woman’s grief.

“After the house, Isabel had Delia,” she says.