She and Peg used to sit at the airport, waiting for their flight, and eavesdrop on conversations between men and women, mothers and children, colleagues. They would take turns making up backstories for them. He grew up in a cult and hasn’t learned how to bond with someone in a healthy way. She’s adopted that five-year-old, who has oppositional defiant disorder. That guy’s a sex addict, cheating with his boss’s wife.

“Don’t touch me,” Wren shrieked, as the man reached out to her. She kicked reflexively, connecting with his knee, and he winced and backed away. “Goddammit,” he growled, and he started toward her, but Wren let out a piercing scream. George covered his hands with his ears, his eyes screwed shut.

Wren let a loud wail loose again. And another. Maybe she had figured out that her aunt was dead, and she was inconsolable. Olive squeezed her arm. Clearly every time Wren opened her mouth, it set the gunman on edge. She had to see that, even if she was young. Didn’t she?

Her weeping was almost rhythmic.

And … was Wren’s foot buzzing?

Wren turned to Olive, and Olive realized that in spite of her cries, not a single tear streaked down her cheeks. Her chin nodded imperceptibly to her sock, where a phone screen glowed beneath and vibrated with a text. She was covering up the sounds with her sobs.

Olive waited until George paced past them, and then she covered Wren’s ankle with her palm. She slipped her fingers beneath the elastic and felt around for the power button, turning it off.

Wren sagged with relief, resting her head against Olive’s shoulder. The movement made George spin around, the gun trained on her.

Peg, I didn’t even jump, she would say, when this was all over.

Olive pasted a wide smile on her face. “George,” she said, “I remember some Goddards from Biloxi. They were in the brick business, family-run. You wouldn’t be related now, would you? I do believe they moved to Birmingham. Or was it Mobile?”

“Shut up,” he growled. “I should have left you in the goddamn closet. I can’t think when you’re yapping.”

Olive quieted dutifully, and then she winked at Wren. Because as George was busy silencing her, he had tucked the gun back into the waistband of his jeans.

—

IN THE AMBULANCE, BEX TRIED to speak. “My … niece …” she rasped, clawing at the shirt of the EMT.

“Don’t try to talk,” the young man said. He had soft eyes and softer hands, and his teeth were a beacon against his dark skin. “We’re gonna take care of you now. We’re almost at the hospital.”

“Wren …”

“When?” he said, mishearing her. “Soon. Real soon.” He smiled down at her. “You got the devil’s own luck.”

What Bex knew was that this was not luck, but karma. If Wren did not get out of that clinic, Bex would never forgive herself. She should have known better than to go behind Hugh’s back to the clinic. But Wren had come to her last week after school, riding her bike to Bex’s studio; she had been finishing a new commission—a mural going into a skyscraper lobby in Orlando, to commemorate the Pulse shooting. It was a fourteen-by-fourteen-foot profile of two men kissing. The pixels were made not of Post-its, as usual, but of photos of people who had died during the AIDS crisis.

“Cool,” Wren had said. “What’s it going to be?”

Bex had explained it. “Want to help?”

She gave Wren hundreds of tiny squares of tinted celluloid. Showing her how to affix them to each photo with glue, Bex instructed her to start at the bottom and screen the last ten rows of photographs in shades of violet celluloid. The next ten rows above them would be blue, then green, then yellow, and so on. Standing far enough away, you would see the kiss, but you would also see a rainbow. Standing close, you’d see all the individual shoulders those two men had to stand on in order to embrace each other openly.

“This isn’t even a thing for kids your age, is it?” Bex mused as they worked beside each other.

“What thing?”

“Being gay.”

“It’s queer, FYI. And I mean, yeah. It still is, I think, if you’re the one who happens to be that way. People assume you’re cis and straight, so if you’re not, you’re different. But who says there’s only one way to be normal?”

Bex stopped working, her hands stilling over the lips of one of the models. “When did you get to be so smart?”

Wren grinned. “What took you so long to notice?” They worked in silence for a while, and then Wren asked, “Does this piece have a name yet?”

“I was thinking maybe Love.”

“That’s perfect,” Wren said. “But not just the word. The whole sentence. Exactly the way you said it.” She brushed a line of glue around a violet celluloid. “Aunt Bex? Can I ask you something? Do you believe that you can fall in love when you’re fifteen?”

Bex’s hands stilled. She lifted the magnifying glasses she wore when she worked so that she could look Wren in the eye. “You bet I do,” she said firmly. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

And oh, it had been delicious—the way Wren’s cheeks had gone pink when she held his name in her mouth; how she talked about him as if there had never been another boy on earth. What love looked like was this: fledgling and unsteady, fierce and soft-shelled at the same time.

Wren didn’t have a mother around to talk to her frankly about sex. Hugh would have probably rather carved out his liver with a teaspoon than have that conversation with his daughter. So Bex asked her niece the questions no one else would: Have you kissed him? Have you done more than that? Have you talked about protection?

No judgment, no finger wagging. Just pragmatism. Once the rocket had left the launchpad, you couldn’t bring it back.

Wren was fifteen; she was writing his name on the leg of her jeans; she was stealing his sweatshirts so that she could sleep in the ghost of his scent. But she’d also been thinking of birth control. “Aunt Bex,” Wren had asked shyly, “will you help me?”

And so it was with the best of intentions that—once again—Bex had done something inexcusable.

She heard a machine somewhere behind her start to beep. The EMT leaned closer. He smelled like wintergreen. “Ma’am,” he said, “try to relax.”

Bex closed her eyes again, thinking of the bullet that had exploded through her, and the pierce of the scalpel that had maybe saved her life.

This is what it means to be human, Bex thought. We are all just canvases for our scars.

—

WHEN HUGH’S PHONE FINALLY DINGED, he lunged for it. But the text wasn’t from Wren—it was from a guy named Dick, a state trooper who had been in his hostage negotiation training sessions. Two hours ago, when George Goddard’s license plate was run, Hugh had reached out to Dick, who got a search warrant from a local judge and let himself into the empty house in Denmark, Mississippi. Now Hugh had the results of Dick’s search: a blurry photo of a handout about medication abortions that had the name and logo of the women’s center on it. It was enough for Hugh to connect the dots from George to this clinic.

Where’s the daughter? Hugh texted.

There was a beat. And then: M.I.A.

Hugh raked his hair, frustrated by the fact that the only person he didn’t want to talk to—his sister—refused to leave the site; and that the people he did want to talk to were not communicating: Wren, George Goddard, his missing daughter. Who the hell could negotiate when no one was listening?

What was he missing, now? What could he use that he hadn’t used before?

Hugh picked up the phone and texted Wren again. He dialed the number of the clinic, his secure line. One ring. Two.

Three rings. Four.

There was a click of connection, and then George’s voice. “I’m busy,” he said.

Muscle memory took over. “I won’t take up too much of your time, George,” Hugh replied. “We were talking about your daughter, when we got cut off.”

When you hung up on me.

“What about her?”

Hugh closed his eyes and made a leap into the unknown. “She wants to talk to you.”

—

LOUIE WARD KNEW EXACTLY THE moment that something in the shooter had changed. Even though he could only hear half the conversation, he could see that the man grew very still. Hope could do that to a person, Louie knew. Paralyze you inside and out.

“What about her?” the shooter said.

When he—George, his name was George, according to the television still playing in the waiting room—said that, Louie realized two very important things:

1. This was personal, for him. Someone—a wife, a daughter, a sister—had had an abortion.

2. He wanted that someone’s approval for today’s actions.

Izzy leaned down on the pretense of tightening his tourniquet. “Her,” she murmured.

“Mmm,” Louie said. “So I heard.”

In the handful of times that the phone had rung over the past couple of hours, the people huddled in the waiting room had been able to take a collective breath. George didn’t turn his back when he was on the phone—he wasn’t that stupid—but he also didn’t silence them if they whispered to each other.

“You think it was his wife?” Izzy whispered.

“Daughter.” Louie grunted as he shifted and a streak of pain shot up his leg.

“You have either of those?”