She knew better. She had been counseled her whole life about how when the devil came to you, he would come in a form you couldn’t resist—like a Yankee boy who seemed to glow like a Roman candle when he grinned. The way Beth knew it was the devil was that he made her lie to her father, saying she had a double shift, when instead she went to the university and sat in the bleachers and watched him in the 4 x 100 relay. Every time he rounded the corner, it seemed he was running straight to her.

What Beth didn’t know—in spite of all the hours she had gone over it in her mind since then—was how, in the moment, it felt like a door had opened on a whole new world—yet, afterward, she was nothing but a cliché. He had spread his fancy blazer on the ground beneath the bleachers like a picnic blanket, he had given her her first beer, and when her head was full of stars, he had laid her down and kissed her. When he peeled off her blouse and touched her, she transformed into someone else—a girl who was beautiful, a girl who wanted more. When he pushed inside her, burning, and then suddenly he stopped, Beth panicked. She had not told him he was her first, but it wasn’t the only lie between them. I’m sorry, she told him, and he kissed her forehead. I’m not, he said.

He promised that he would come visit her and that this wasn’t a one-time deal. He put his phone number and his name into her contacts. She floated home, wondering if everyone in Mississippi could see how different she was now, as if being loved left a patina on your skin.

Two days later he had still not texted, so she gathered up all her courage and made the first move. One second later her phone buzzed with the news that the text was undeliverable. She dialed the number, only to have an elderly lady pick up and tell her that there was no one there by that name.

There were too many John Smiths on Facebook to count. There was a John Smith at the University of Wisconsin, but an Internet search revealed him to be a professor of comparative literature in his mid-seventies.

“That rat bastard,” Miz DuVille said, shaking Beth out of her reverie.

“Yeah, that was only the start,” Beth replied. “I missed my period.”

“No condom?”

“No, but Susannah at church—who volunteered with me for the little kid Sunday School—told me you can’t get pregnant the first time.”

“That’s not—” The lawyer shook her head. “Never mind. Go on.”

“I figured I was all right. But I missed another period, so I took a pregnancy test.” She looked up, sheepish. “Actually, three.”

“Then what?”

Beth shifted. “I kept putting it off. I thought, Something will happen. It’ll go away.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I prayed. I prayed for a miscarriage.”

“Is that what happened?”

Beth shook her head. “I called the clinic and made an appointment.”

“Didn’t they ask your age?”

“Yeah. I said I was twenty-five. I was afraid they’d tell me they couldn’t help me.” Beth shrugged. “They asked when my last period was, and they told me I was fourteen weeks and they did procedures up to sixteen weeks. They said it would be eight hundred dollars for the procedure.”

“But the Center is—”

“Two and a half hours away. I took a bus, and all the savings I had from my job—a whopping two hundred and fifty dollars. I didn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t.” Beth took a deep breath.

“How were you going to raise the rest of the money?”

Beth shook her head. “I don’t know. I figured I’d steal, if I had to. From my dad. Or the cash register at work.”

“I’m confused. If you went to the Center—”

“They asked for picture ID, which would have given away that I was a minor. I started to cry. The lady at the front desk said if I couldn’t tell my parents, I could get a judicial waiver, and then come back. She gave me a form to fill out.”

Mandy DuVille frowned. “But you didn’t. And that’s why you wound up here.”

“I tried,” Beth said. “But the day before, someone from the judge’s office called and told me my hearing was canceled. They told me the judge was having a personal emergency and going to Belize with his wife.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” the lawyer said. “There’s always a judge on call, for restraining orders for domestic violence cases or anything else life-threatening—”

“I guess my life wasn’t being threatened,” Beth said. “Not the way they thought, anyhow. The lady who called me from the judge’s office said the quickest she could get me in was in two weeks. But I couldn’t wait that long.”

“Because the Center only does abortions up to sixteen weeks of pregnancy,” the lawyer said.

Beth nodded. “I had to do something. I read online about a girl who said she got ulcer pills from her bodega that could cause a miscarriage. I didn’t have a bodega anywhere near me, though. So I posted on a message board online.”

She remembered what she had typed: How do I get rid of a pregnancy without my parents finding out?

The responses had been horrible:

Throw yourself down the stairs.

Broomstick.

Good old-fashioned hanger.

You sick bitch, kill urself not ur baby.

But buried somewhere in the responses saying she was a sinner who should have kept her legs together was a girl who told her she could purchase abortion pills online.

“They came from China with instructions,” Beth said. “It only took five days to come in the mail.”

She’d thought it would be easy. Like taking Imodium when you had the runs, and then they magically were gone. She did everything the way she was supposed to, tucking the first set of pills high into her cheeks like a chipmunk, and she sat down on the toilet and waited. She threw the packaging into the trash. When the cramps started, she was so happy, she burst into tears. But soon they were so strong she had to run the water in the sink to drown out her moans. She staggered off the toilet and sank into a squat to try to make the pain go away and that’s when it happened.

“I wrapped it up,” Beth sobbed, “and I put it in the garbage. I didn’t know what else to do.”

She needed someone to tell her that she wasn’t a terrible person; that she hadn’t done the unthinkable. She wiped her eyes on the blanket and looked at her lawyer for the absolution she feared she would never have.

“Miz Duville,” she whispered. “It wasn’t a baby yet, was it?”

—

LIL GODDARD HAD EITHER VANISHED off the face of the earth or had never existed. In spite of the pastor’s description of her, and George’s own comments about his daughter, no one had been able to turn up any information about the girl.

Hugh was multitasking—still trying to win George’s trust on the phone while scanning the notes and the reports that were being fed to him by detectives. Lil Goddard wasn’t at her home. She had never gotten a traffic ticket and didn’t have a vehicle registered to her name. The only hit a Google search retrieved was from ten years ago, when she played an angel in a Christmas pageant at her church and had a captioned photo in the local paper. It wasn’t uncommon for minors to leave very faint trails, but Lil had also never been enrolled in any public school in the state of Mississippi. Then again, many kids of evangelicals were home-schooled. And all Hugh really knew about Lil was that she had, at some point, had an abortion at this clinic—but the records were not accessible online, so it could have been yesterday or a month ago.

Hell, for all Hugh knew, George Goddard had killed Lil in a fit of rage and buried her in the backyard.

But if they could find her, maybe she could convince George to end this.

“I could get a message to your daughter.” Hugh hesitated. “I could be an intermediary. I’m sure you want to explain to her what’s happening.”

“I can’t,” George said, his voice cracking.

Because she wouldn’t listen? Hugh thought. Because she’s dead?

“Man, I hear you. Seems like me and my daughter can’t even agree that the sky is blue sometimes.”

Hugh had a sudden vision of him lying on his back on a field, with Wren’s nine-year-old head pillowed on his belly, as she pointed at the clouds in the sky. That one looks like a condom, she’d said. He had barely controlled himself from bolting upright. How do you know what a condom is? Wren had rolled her eyes. Dad. I’m not a baby.

“I could help you,” Hugh suggested. “Maybe I could even get her to come here and talk in person … if you were willing to give me something in return.”

“Like what?”

“I want all the hostages safe, George. But this isn’t about me. It’s about you. And your daughter. She’s the reason you came here, today. Clearly, she’s pretty special to you.”

“You ever wish you could turn back the clock?” George said softly. “It’s like yesterday, she was begging me to braid her hair. And now … now …”

“Now what?”

“She’s all grown up,” George whispered.

Hugh closed his eyes. Sometimes when he walked past Wren’s room and heard her FaceTiming with a friend and laughing, her voice sounded like Annabelle’s, like a woman instead of a girl. “Yeah,” Hugh said. “I know.”

—

WREN COULD HEAR HER FATHER. For whatever reason, the shooter had turned on the speakerphone.