Marek is suddenly inside the trailer. No footsteps on the metal stairs, no creak. He surveys the room once—the lamp, the rug, the cross-stitch—and his lip curls into a sneer. Then he looks straight at Silas.
“The dog.”
Silas blinks. “What about the dog?”
“Don't forget about him. We take him the same night.”
“It's a Labrador, Marek,” Silas says. “It's not a witness. It doesn't need to be extracted under cover of darkness like it's carrying microfilm.”
“The same night.”
“He'll bark at us the whole?—”
“He won't.” Marek drifts to the side table and turns the gospel radio off with one fingertip, and the trailer goes quiet. “He'll come to me.”
Silas looks at Elias. Elias looks at me. I shrug because Marek has never once explained the things that matter to him, and he's never once been wrong about them either.
“What is it about this dog?” Silas finally asks. “Genuinely. You've mentioned it in every meeting. You put it on the whiteboard. You wroteDOGand underlined it twice. It's a Labrador named Beau who's never done anything except love a monster who doesn't deserve it.”
Marek turns his head and looks at Silas the way he looks at a card he's just flipped.
“You just answered your own question, brother,” he says, and glides back out into the daylight.
The three of us stand in the parsonage smell, staring at the empty doorway.
“I hate it when he does that,” Silas mutters.
“You love it when he does that,” Elias says.
“I love it and I hate it. Both things are true.” Silas heads for the door, then pauses to look back at me. “Text your girl something normal. Boring. Ask what she wants for dinner.”
He leaves. Elias follows, and at the threshold, he stops and looks back at me standing alone in the middle of the room built out of my worst memories, and whatever he sees on my face, he doesn't question it.
“Three days,” he says, and steps out.
I stand there another minute in silence. Then I pull out my phone.
What do you want for dinner?
The reply comes in under a minute, and I'm smiling before I finish reading it.
Whatever Deke's making. Tell him I said hi. Tell the peacocks nothing, they've done enough.
I close the trailer door behind me and walk back toward the light.
25
WREN
The cruiser pulls into the lot at a quarter past three, and my stomach drops even though I've been expecting it since they said they'd drive to Vance’s house.
Paige sees it through the front window first. She stops mid-sentence—something about the Hendersons' cat and its ongoing war with their new baby gate—and her hand goes flat against the reception counter.
“Wren.”
“I see it.”
Deputy Carl Munson climbs out, settles his hat on his head, and takes his time crossing the gravel. Carl brings his coonhound in every spring for heartworm season and once cried in exam two when we saved her from a snakebite. He's not walking like a man coming to save anything now, though. He's walking like a man who drew the short straw.