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I don't know, I write.

I sit back down on the stool and take his hand again. It's warmer than it was. At least, I think it's warmer than it was. I lay my forehead against the cold edge of the steel table beside his hip, close my eyes, and hold on.

CHAPTER 20

SILAS

Iwake up alive, and I have no idea what to do with it.

That's the first clear thought. Not where I am, or how long, or whether she's all right. Just that. For six years every morning ended at the same place: Halloween, Judah, the church. I never let myself imagine the morning after, because I never expected to see one. There was no after. There was the night, and whatever it cost.

Now there's a ceiling tile with a water stain shaped like Florida, and afternoon light slanting through a window blind, and a dull, deep ache in my left side that pulses with my heartbeat. There's a smell of bleach and wet fur. There's a weight against my hip.

I turn my head.

Evie is asleep on a rolling stool, folded over so her head rests on the steel table beside me, and her hand is wrapped around mine. Somebody's green scrub pants. A sweatshirt printed with a veterinary clinic's name. Her hair has dried stiff with river water and her cheek is creased from the table edge. Dried blood outlines every one of her fingernails, and none of it is hers.

I don't move. I lie there and look at her.

On the instrument tray beside my head, among torn suture packets and a hemostat crusted brown, my mother stands in her tin frame. Somebody has tucked a torn page under the corner of it. Black ink, hard strokes, a steeple going up in sparks over a bowl of dark water. I don't need to be told who drew it. I've watched those hands load a revolver and tie off my arm and hold a man's head down on a desk. I didn't know they could do this.

Her fingers twitch in mine. She comes awake all at once, the way I do, head up, eyes wide, already reaching. Her gaze goes to my face and stays there.

For a long moment, neither of us speaks.

Then her face crumples. It happens fast and she hates it; I watch her fight it and lose. She puts her forehead down on the back of my hand, and her shoulders shake silently. I lift my other hand, which feels like it weighs forty pounds, and lay it on her hair.

"You went gray," she tells my knuckles. "You went gray, and your lips went blue, and you stopped answering me."

"I'm answering now."

"You weren't on Front Street." She lifts her head. Her eyes are red and furious. "You weren't in the truck. You weren't here all night while I had my hands inside you guessing. Don't you ever do that to me again."

"I won't."

"You don't get to promise things anymore. You broke the last one." But she doesn't let go of my hand.

The water she brings me is warm from sitting on the counter, and I drink it anyway. She tells me the rest while I do, plainly, in order, the way I'd have told it. A day and a half since Front Street. A vet's surgery, a vet's sutures, two bags of fluid, a horse antibiotic she dosed by arithmetic. She went for Nellie and Lacey at first light this morning while I slept, walked them out through the marsh, and left each girl at the end of her own road. They'll say they slipped out of the retreat when the fires started and got lost in the woods. The other nine were still asleep on the fellowship hall floor when their mothers came for them.

"Nobody walked them to the water," she says. "Nobody was left to."

That lands somewhere in my chest that none of the knives reached.

She shows me the news on Charlotte's phone, and she doesn't make me watch all of it. A helicopter shot of the parish at dawn, four black columns of smoke. Thirty-one bodies recovered from a flooded cemetery. Judah Harlowe's among the dead. An elderly woman, not yet identified, found in the ruins of the family chapel. State police, the FBI. A person of interest, female, still at large.

She turns the screen dark and lays the phone face down on the tray.

"I'm sending the ledger," she tells me.

I wait. She doesn't need me to argue, and I don't.

"All of it. The black book, Douglas's list, Charlotte's binder, Marsh's folders. Photographs of every page to three newspapers tonight, the originals to the attorney general from the first post office across the state line." She says it like a thing already done. "If we vanish and leave it burned, the men are gone and so are the girls. Too many years of them to count. Nobody tells Kaylee Guidry's mother where her daughter went. I didn't do this to bury them twice."

"Send it," I tell her.

She searches my face, looking for the objection, the careful man's reservations.

"It'll hang us," she offers, as if to be fair.