There was no question that he took pride on Sundays, when at church, mothers came up to him and complimented him on Lil. Or when people were surprised to find out that she was being raised by a single father. He was a man who’d been told he’d done wrong all his life, and this was balm on a wound. But what George loved the most was the magic that happened between him and Lil when it was just the two of them, running the brush through her curls. George knew he was a quiet man, not given to, well, chitchat. But when he was standing behind his daughter, with his hands in her hair, she talked to him. And he started to talk back.

They talked about silly things: whether they’d rather have a fire pole in the house to get from upstairs to downstairs, or a swimming pool full of Jell-O; what they’d buy if they won the Powerball, if Batman would kick Wonder Woman’s butt, or vice versa. There was something about standing behind Lil and not making eye contact that made talking easier for them both, even when the conversation turned tougher—standing up to the girls at church who bullied her for wearing the same dress every Sunday; understanding that a boy who stuffed a frog down her shirt might have actually been trying to get her to notice him; talk of her mama.

George lived for those moments, twice a day, when he did his daughter’s hair.

Then one night, when Lil was fourteen, she didn’t come into the kitchen after her shower. George found her in her room, her elbows twisted behind her head, weaving her hair into a braid. “It seems silly for you to do it,” she said, “when I can do it myself.”

George didn’t know how to say it wasn’t about that, but about the moments he spent with her. He didn’t know how to explain that each sweep of a brush could jog something in a teenager that she didn’t even know she was holding inside. He didn’t know how to say that seeing her fix her own hair filled him with a terrible heaviness, as if this was the beginning of the end.

So he said nothing at all.

If Lil had still let him braid her hair, would he be here, now? Or would she have realized that there was nothing she could do or say that would make her seem less perfect to him? Would she have known that whatever knot she had gotten into, they would untangle together?

He had put down the telephone receiver because it hurt his ear. It was on speakerphone now, and he was pacing in front of the desk where you signed in. But Hugh McElroy had stopped talking, and so had George, both lost in their thoughts.

“You still there?” George asked.

“Of course,” Hugh replied.

And then, from somewhere behind the desk, he heard a sneeze.

—

IMMEDIATELY, IZZY SNEEZED, TOO. SHE faked a series of sneezes, an allergic jag that should have won her an Oscar. If she could convince him that it had been her, instead of the two people hiding in the supply closet behind the desk, then maybe they would stay safe.

If the shooter found them, he’d also realize that Izzy had lied to his face when she told him it was empty.

He spun around, stalked to the closet, and yanked open the door.

—

“GEORGE?” HUGH SAID. HE COULD hear commotion and shouting and something clattering. “George, talk to me.” His heart began to pound. What the fuck is going on?

Hugh heard a grunt. A scuffle. “Get up. Get up!” George yelled.

“George, what’s going on?” Hugh tried again. He swallowed his worst suspicions. “Are you all right? Did something happen?”

There was a crash and a cry and then Wren’s voice: No, no, no … don’t!

All of the air left Hugh’s lungs. He was paralyzed, terrified for her. His only hope lay in calming George down before he did the unthinkable.

“George,” he urged, “I can help. I can—”

“Shut up,” George said, and there was a clatter, and then the line went dead.

One p.m.

THE SHOOTER HAD HUNG UP, BUT HUGH WAS STILL TRIUMPHANT. HE had the first puzzle piece he needed for this negotiation. George Goddard had revealed—maybe intentionally and maybe not—what had brought him to the Center today. The greatest weapon a negotiator had was information; knowledge was power.

Wasn’t that what he always told Wren?

When Wren was in middle school, and he still packed her lunches, he used to include a sandwich, a bottle of water, an apple, and a nugget of knowledge. On a piece of paper, he’d write a fact: There’s a planet where it rains glass. If you cry in space, the tears stick to your face. There’s a tiny aluminum sculpture on the moon. Your body is made out of bits of stars that exploded. Atoms are mostly extra space, and if you squeezed all that space out of the atoms that make up humans, the rest of the mass could fit in less than one square inch. The Milky Way has four arms, not two.

None of these facts had included how to hide in a hostage situation. How to protect yourself if someone comes at you with a gun, and you’re unarmed. Hugh could have easily filled her head with that wisdom because it was the bulk of his career knowledge. But for reasons he could not fathom right now, he had instead fed her information that would make her the hit of a cocktail party.

Knowledge was power, and he had left his daughter without a weapon. Which meant this was up to him to fix.

“You,” he called to a young detective. “Find out what George Goddard does for a living. If he’s married. How long he’s lived in Mississippi. If there’s a bar he hangs out at. Where he bought his gun. If he has any priors.” The woman blinked at him. “Now!”

She scurried off, and Hugh sank down on the folding chair behind him. He buried his face in his hands. He might already be too late to help his sister. He could not afford to make a mistake. It wasn’t just his professional reputation on the line, this time.

The Milky Way has four arms, not two.

It wasn’t that the silhouette of the galaxy had changed. It was that often, you couldn’t see the shape of something when you were stuck inside it. You couldn’t be objective, if you were too close.

It was why doctors did not operate on relatives and judges recused themselves from matters that involved them and hostage negotiators stepped back from situations where they had a vested, personal interest.

Well, Hugh thought. Fuck that.

—

BEX LAY ON HER BACK, feeling the soup of her breathing, drowning even on dry land. Everything hurt: inhaling, exhaling, blinking. She was dizzy and faint and felt as if a pike had been driven through her chest.

At least Wren was safe, still. If Bex had to die to keep it that way, she would do it.

She should have told Hugh. She could have told him what Wren had asked her to do, and made him swear not to tell Wren that she had said anything. Then he would have known they were going to the clinic, at least.

He would know she was in there.

But Bex knew from personal experience that the minute a father realized his baby girl wasn’t a baby anymore, something infinitesimal changed in the relationship. Even if it seemed outwardly solid and unaltered, you could still sense it, like the broken bone that never properly healed, or the hairline crack in the vase to which your eye was unerringly drawn. And so, she had kept Wren’s secret.

She was good at that.

She felt herself starting to shiver. Did that mean she was in shock? That she had lost too much blood?

Everyone in this room, she realized, had a story that ended within these walls. If today hadn’t happened, many of those stories would have gone untold. There were a hundred different paths that led to the corner of Juniper and Montfort—from pregnancies that were unwanted to those that were cherished, but impossible to carry through; from young girls who were trying to do the right thing to the relatives who lied for them. Here was the one thing all these women had in common: they hadn’t asked for this moment in their lives.

It was getting harder to breathe. Bex tried to turn her head toward the closet, just in case Wren could miraculously see her through the slats. It hurt so much that the edges of her vision went a hot, searing white.

Bex made a promise to herself: if she got out of here—if she survived—she would tell Hugh the truth.

All of it.

—

GEORGE STARED DOWN AT THE gun in his hand. Now what?

He had imagined his vengeance as if it were a movie he had seen long ago, where someone wronged took justice into his own hands. He saw himself bursting through the front door of the Center with his gun raised like Stallone or Willis; he saw a doctor cowering under the heel of his boot; he saw an apocalyptic landscape of destruction left in his wake as he emerged, the vanquisher.

Here is what had not been part of his vision: the ringing in his ears when the gun fired, the spray of people’s blood, the way they begged for mercy.

George glanced at the group of people huddled in the waiting room. The doctor, injured. The nurse who was hovering near him. The blond girl who kept tugging at her hair. The one who had just killed her baby. The lady who was struggling to breathe. He had done that to her. It made George feel sick, watching her suffer. In the abstract, eliminating everyone who was tied to the Center had seemed masterful, necessary. In truth, it was messy.