OLIVE’S EYES WERE TIGHTLY SHUT, even though the closet was dark. She was trying to block out the heated conversation on the other side of the door by picturing Peg, the shape of her face, the smell of her hair when she just came out of the shower, the sound of her name in Peg’s mouth, blurred by her southern accent: Olive. Olive. I love.

“Are you afraid of dying?” Wren whispered, pulling Olive out of her reverie.

“Isn’t everyone?”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it until now.”

This girl was so young; younger, even, than Olive’s students. They had been wedged together on the floor of the utility closet for three hours now.

“I think what I’m afraid of,” Olive said, “is leaving everyone else behind.”

“Do you have a husband? Kids?”

Olive shook her head, unsure what to say. There were still places in Mississippi where she introduced Peg as her roommate. And she would never have walked down the street in broad daylight holding Peg’s hand.

“Not in the cards for me,” she murmured.

“Same for my aunt,” Wren said. “I never asked her if she was lonely.”

“You’ll be able to, when you get out of here.”

“If I get out of here,” Wren whispered. “My dad used to actually tell me to make sure I was wearing clean underwear. I mean, what a cliché, right?” She hesitated. “I’m wearing Friday.”

“Beg pardon?”

“It’s Tuesday. And my day-of-the-week underwear says Friday.”

Olive smiled in the dark. “Your secret is safe with me.”

“What if I get shot? I mean, it’s clean, but it’s the wrong day.” Wren laughed, a little unhinged. “What if I’m bleeding all over and the paramedics notice that—”

“You won’t get shot.”

In the dark, Olive could see the fierce shine of the girl’s eyes. “You don’t know that.”

She didn’t. To live was always a conditional verb.

There was a flurry of footsteps outside the closet door, and the phone rang. Both Olive and Wren held their breath. Olive grabbed Wren’s hand.

“I don’t wanna talk to you.” It was the shooter’s voice. It got fainter as he moved away again.

Olive squeezed Wren’s fingers. “Peg,” she breathed. “That’s the name of the woman I love.”

“The … oh, okay,” Wren replied. “That’s cool.”

Olive smiled to herself. Yes, Peg was cool. Cooler than she was, anyway. She made fun of Olive for not wearing white after Labor Day and for waiting a half hour after eating before she swam. Live a little, Peg would say to her, laughing.

Right now that was all Olive wanted to do.

“I just wanted to say her name out loud,” Olive added softly.

“At least you got to fall in love,” Wren whispered.

“Isn’t that why you’re here?”

Wren ducked her head. “I don’t know. If I do survive, after this, I may never have sex.”

Olive grinned. “If I survive,” she replied, “it’s all I’m going to do.”

—

GEORGE ANSWERED THE PHONE ON the second ring. “You know,” Hugh began, as if George had not hung up on him before, “I used to go to church with my kid. Not every week—I wasn’t as good a Christian as I could have been. But always Easter services and Christmas Eve.”

George snorted. “That’s like putting gravy on Skittles and saying you made Thanksgiving dinner.”

“Yeah, I know. It was my fault. I have a hard time sitting still. And I couldn’t handle the holier-than-thous. You know, the guys who sit right up front in the pews and act like they’ve got some special VIP pass to God?”

“It don’t work that way,” George said.

“Hell, no,” Hugh said. “Anyway, it must drive you crazy when you see people acting like that, too. People taking liberties that belong to a greater power.”

“I don’t follow.”

Hugh looked down at the slip of paper one of the detectives had given him. “The Lord brings death and makes alive.”

“Samuel 2:6,” George said.

“Is that why you came here today? Because you felt people in this clinic didn’t have the right to end a life?”

There was silence on the line.

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” Hugh said softly. “Not yours. The Lord’s.”

“That’s not why I came,” George said. “It’s why you came.”

“I came to talk to you—”

“You came,” George interrupted, “to decide who lives today, and who dies. So, tell me … which one of us is playing God?”

—

GEORGE WAS SIX YEARS OLD when he learned how fine the line was between life and death. It had been one of those beautiful fall days in Mississippi. The colors had peaked, and the trees were a jeweled necklace wrapped around the lake. He was walking through the woods, liking the crunch of the red maple and hickory and bur oak leaves under his sneakers. He was kicking an acorn when he found the bird.

It was not a baby, but some kind of sparrow that had broken its wing. It hopped in small circles on the ground.

He picked it up as if it were made of glass and carried it all the way back to his home. There, he found a cigar box and lined it with Kleenex. For three days, he hid the little bird under his bed, trying to give it water, and bringing it leaves and grubs and anything else he thought might be appetizing.

The bird did not improve. It barely moved. He could hardly see the rise and fall of its breast.

He needed help, so he went to his father.

What he hadn’t known, at the time, was that his daddy was in one of his moods, sleeping off last night’s excesses.

It’s not getting any better, he explained. Can you fix it?

You bet. His father lifted the bird with the gentlest of touches. One long finger stroked from the crown of the bird’s head to its crooked tail. And then he snapped its neck.

You killed it! George cried.

His father pushed the limp creature back and corrected him. I put it out of its misery.

George couldn’t stop sobbing; he hadn’t stopped, not when he buried the cigar box in his mother’s melon patch; not when she made him catfish for dinner; not when he lay down in his pajamas after saying his prayers for the departed soul of the bird. He could hear his parents arguing in the hall.

What kind of father does that?

Back then he had wondered if his father truly thought he was doing the right thing by ending the bird’s suffering.

Now, George looked around the clinic waiting room at the motley collection of people whose fate he held in his hand.

Violence, from one angle, looked like mercy from another.

—

TEN YEARS EARLIER, HUGH HAD been one of a dozen cops on the ground twenty-two stories below the Regions Plaza. He squinted up at the roof, where a slight guy in a windbreaker wavered on the edge. The chief was talking into a bullhorn. “Step away from the edge,” he said. “Don’t jump.”

It seemed to Hugh that the last thing you wanted to say to someone in this situation was Don’t jump. It was like you were planting the seed more firmly in his head, when what you really needed to do was distract him.

“Chief,” he said, “I’ve got an idea.”

Within minutes, Hugh had climbed a set of stairs from the twenty-second floor to the roof of the building and crept to the edge where the man sat. Except he wasn’t a man. He was a boy, really. Eighteen, if that.

Hugh sat down beside the kid, facing the opposite direction, away from the edge. He turned on the digital recorder in his pocket. “Hey,” Hugh said.

“They sent you?”

“They didn’t do anything. I came up here because I wanted to.”

The boy glanced at him. “And you just happen to be wearing a cop uniform.”

“My name is Hugh. How about you?”

“Alex.”

“Is it okay if I call you that?”

The boy shrugged. The wind ruffled his fine hair.

“You okay?”

“Do I look okay?”

Hugh thought back to when he was a teenager, and such a smart-ass that once, Bex had made dinner and set an extra plate at the table. That’s for your attitude, she had said, and feel free to leave it behind when you’re done eating.

Hugh noticed the familiar colors of an Ole Miss T-shirt peeking from behind the boy’s half-zipped windbreaker. “Ole Miss, huh?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Because if you were a fan of Mississippi State I might have had to push you off.”

A laugh burst out of the kid’s throat, surprising him. “If I was a fan of Mississippi State I would have jumped.”

Hugh leaned back a little, like he had all the time in the world, and started talking about who was going to replace the quarterback after he graduated. It went on from there, like they were just two guys shooting the breeze.

After a couple of hours had passed, Alex said, “You ever wonder why they call them stories? The floors of a building?”

“No.”

“I mean, then why isn’t a building called a book?”

Hugh laughed. “You’re pretty smart,” he said.

“If I had a dime for every time I heard that,” Alex said, “I’d have a dime.”

“I find that hard to believe. Come on. You’re funny, and intelligent, and you clearly root for the right football team. There’s got to be someone out there who’s worried about you.”

“Nope,” Alex said, his voice catching. “Not a single one.”