She nods against her pillow, Aaron Bear tucked under her chin.
"For a little while, tesoro. He's helping keep us safe."
"From what?"
From a serial killer who left flowers on my desk. From a countdown that ends in twenty-four days. From the fact that Mamma might not be here for your ninth birthday.
"From people who don't like judges very much," I say, which is technically true and completely inadequate. "Nothing you need to worry about."
"You always say that."
"Because it's always true."
She studies me with those dark eyes that see too much. "He watches you different than Xander does."
My breath catches. "What do you mean?"
"Xander watches the doors and windows. Cole watchesyou." She yawns, already losing the thread of observation to exhaustion. "Like you're the most important thing in the room."
I don't have an answer for that. I kiss her forehead and smooth the hair back from her face and tell her I love her to the moon and back, the same words I've said every night since she was old enough to understand them.
"Love you to the moon and back and around again," she mumbles, already half-asleep.
I stand in her doorway for longer than I should, counting the rise and fall of her chest.
Uno, due, tre, quattro...
Twenty breaths before I make myself leave. I pull the door to the angle she prefers.
The house goes quiet the way it always does, in stages, like a courtroom emptying after a ruling.
Xander leaves with a nod and the soft click of the front door. Cole checks the perimeter and the locks and whatever else he checks while I stand at the kitchen sink pretending to wash a glass that's already clean. The sounds narrow down to the tick of the old radiator in the hallway and the rush of ocean waves from Chesca's sound machine behind her cracked door.
I go to bed.
Not to the monitoring room, not to find Cole, not to do any of the reckless things my body suggested last night. I brush my teeth. Wash my face.
Lie down in my cold bed like a responsible adult with twenty-four days left to live, and look up at the ceiling.
The ceiling stares back.
Twenty-four days.
I've been saying it all day, to Cole, to Kade through the speaker, to myself in the mirror when I caught my reflection in the courthouse bathroom. The number should feel abstract. Theoretical. A data point in someone else's threat assessment.
It doesn't.
Patricia Brown had grandchildren. Three of them, and the youngest had just learned to walk. She showed me photographs at a reception six months ago, her face lit up with that particular grandmother pride, and she told me she was going to retire next year.
Thirty years on the bench, she said. Thirty years of service, and then she'd spend the rest of her life spoiling those babies.
She never got to retire.
Someone put a flower on her desk and now her grandchildren are going to grow up without her.
That's going to be you. That's going to be Chesca, except she won't even have thirty years of memories. She'll have eight. Eight years and a mother who went to work one day and didn't come home.
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes until I see stars. The pressure doesn't help. Nothing helps.