There were those who were more disruptive: protesters who took photos of the license plates of cars parked in the lot and published them on websites so that they could be harassed; protesters who had created a geo-fencing mechanism so that as you came within a couple hundred feet of the clinic, your phone’s browser would be filled with anti-abortion advertising. (When Louie checked Facebook at work, a pop-up reminded him that he could keep his baby.) Davis, a young minister, blocked incoming cars with his body and screamed at the patients, telling them they were going to hell. Reverend Rusty, from Operation Save America, drove down from Wichita every couple of months in an old VW bus with a group of followers he could whip into a frenzy with his horsewhip voice and rattlesnake eyes.

Every now and then there was someone new. Last March, a Christian college had a spring break trip to Mississippi, and a busload of fresh-faced college students picketed for a full week. There was a man who showed up for a few days with a snarling pit bull, but he disappeared as quickly as he’d come. There was the time, about a year ago, when a crazy protester barreled into the clinic and chained himself to an ultrasound machine—not realizing that they were portable and could be wheeled out, which was exactly how the police transported him from the building to arrest him. And, apparently, there was Janine.

With that wig off her head, he recognized her as an anti. He couldn’t believe that they had been under the same roof and he hadn’t recognized her, until that moment. It made him feel foolish. Violated.

When Louie was a boy, Miss Essie would come visit and sit on their porch and complain about the head of the ladies’ auxiliary at church, yet every Sunday she’d be cozying to the woman as if they shared a twin bed. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, she would say, when his grandmama called her on her hypocrisy.

Then find yourself more suitable company, his grandmama used to argue.

Louie imagined that this young lady had been trying to save her own skin. Clearly, it had backfired. When she regained consciousness, would she apologize to the women who’d come to this Center because they had reached the end of their ropes? Or to Izzy and himself, who fought society and politics and, yes, violence, to give those women a last chance?

She could apologize a thousand times to Vonita, but it wouldn’t bring her back to life.

This woman lying feet away from him would probably be surprised to know that she was not the first pro-lifer to walk into the Center. He had personally performed abortions on at least a dozen.

Louie did not know a single colleague who hadn’t done the same. These women claimed to be pro-life and insisted the fetus was sacred, until it happened to be inside them and didn’t square with their life expectations. They would come into the procedure room and say that it was different, for them. Or they would bring their daughters and say that obviously this was an exception. Louie wanted to point out that everyone who walked through the Center’s door was someone’s daughter. But he didn’t.

If these women burst into tears on Louie’s table because they never imagined themselves there, he did not call them hypocrites. Any of us can rationalize the things we do. But he hoped empathy would spread, an invasive weed of compassion.

A day or two later, after he performed their abortions, these same women would call him a killer again as he walked from his car into his place of work. He did not consider them frauds. He understood why they felt they had to go back to being who everyone else in their social circles believed them to be.

Indeed, when pro-lifers came to him to terminate a pregnancy and told him that they did not believe in abortion, Louie Ward said only one thing:

Scoot down.

—

PROBLEM SOLVED, JOY THOUGHT BITTERLY. Want to clear up a divisive issue? Throw all the parties into the crucible of a hostage situation, and let them simmer.

She looked down at the unconscious body of the woman who had been suffering beside her. Never in a hundred years would it have occurred to her that she was an undercover anti-choice protester. If she had known, would Joy have even given her the time of day?

This was karma, in its purest form. It wasn’t as if Janine had just wandered into the wrong place, like Joy had.

Yesterday, she had gone to the wrong clinic. Like the Center, it was painted orange. It was literally around the corner from the Center. The sign even said THE WOMEN’S CENTER, as if they were deliberately trying to confuse patients.

The waiting room was filled with posters of fetuses in different stages: I AM SIX WEEKS AND I HAVE FINGERNAILS! I AM TEN WEEKS AND I CAN TURN MY HEAD AND FROWN! I AM SEVENTEEN WEEKS—I JUST HAD A DREAM! It had seemed patently cruel to her, to have these posters on the walls, but maybe they were meant to weed out the women who were still unsure of their decision. Joy closed her eyes, so that she wouldn’t have to look at them.

She heard her name called, and a smiling woman with a dark cap of hair led her back to a cubicle. The woman wore a lab coat and had the name Maria embroidered over her heart in loopy script. “How about we start with an ultrasound!” Maria said, and Joy realized she was one of those women who spoke only in sentences with exclamation points. “To see how far along your baby is!”

On the examination table, Joy watched Maria squirt gel onto her belly and then rub the ultrasound wand around. “Look at your little miracle!” Maria said, turning the screen toward her. On the screen was a fully formed, chubby black-and-white baby.

Joy had looked on the Internet; she knew her fifteen-week fetus was about the size of an apple, maybe four inches long. But this thing on the screen, it was sucking its thumb. It had hair and eyebrows and fingernails. It looked like it could crawl already. As she stared at the ultrasound screen, she noticed that the movements and twitches of the fetus were repetitive. It was playing on a loop.

Joy cleared her throat. “I think maybe there’s been a misunderstanding,” she said. “I’m here for an abortion.”

“You know if you get an abortion, you probably won’t be able to have children … ever! And that’s if you survive in the first place,” Maria said.

She went on: “Do you go to church? Does your boyfriend?” Even these questions sounded enthusiastic. “If you’ve let Jesus into your heart,” Maria said, “He doesn’t want you to kill your baby!”

By now Joy was utterly confused. “I think I’ve made a mistake.”

Maria grasped her arm. “I am so glad to hear you say that. We can help you, Joy. We can help you and your child. We have lots of resources on adoption!”

A suspicion crept into Joy’s head. “I … need to think about it,” she said, pulling down her shirt and sitting up.

Maria brightened. “There’s no rush!”

Even that was a lie. Joy knew she had exactly four days before she could no longer legally have an abortion in the state of Mississippi.

It wasn’t until she was out on the street, breathing hard, that she looked up and saw the actual Center across the street. She ran past the protesters who shouted at her and repeatedly pressed the intercom button. The electronic door lock buzzed, and Joy hurried inside.

“Is this the Center?” she asked the woman at the reception desk, who nodded. “You’re sure?”

“I better be, since I own the place. Do you have an appointment?”

She had a name tag—VONITA. When Joy apologized for being late, Vonita knew exactly what had happened. “Goddamn pregnancy crisis center,” Vonita said, “pardon my French. They’re like weeds—sprouting up next to every abortion clinic, to purposely confuse patients.”

“I’m pretty sure they’re a bunch of quacks.”

“I know they are,” Vonita said. “The state’s got us jumping through a hundred legal hoops just to keep our license, and they’re completely unvetted. They tell you we don’t have real doctors here? And that you’ll probably bleed to death?” She shook her head. “You’re more likely to be hit by a bus crossing the street to get here than you are to die from complications from an abortion.”

You’re more likely to die from sneaking into an abortion clinic to make some kind of moral point.

With a sinking feeling, Joy realized that Janine had gotten what she wanted. It may not have been the way she intended, but in all likelihood this clinic was now going to close—if not temporarily, then permanently. Vonita, the owner, was dead. And who would be willing to come here after this? What would happen to women like Joy, who were fifteen weeks pregnant and scheduled for an abortion tomorrow or the day after?

Joy glanced down at Janine’s sprawled body again. It just went to show you: there was no right way to do the wrong thing.

Except to not do it at all.

She could feel the prickle of everyone else’s eyes on her as she slowly knelt on the carpet in front of Janine.

Go figure. When you cradled a liar’s head in your lap, it felt just like anyone else’s.

—

IN A WAY, OLIVE THOUGHT, being in the dark was even harder than being out there with the others. She could hear conversations, stomping, crashes. She knew when the shooter was angry and she knew when someone was in pain. But because she couldn’t actually see with her own eyes, she began to paint pictures in her mind of what was happening. And what she could dream with a fertile imagination had to be much worse than the reality.

Right?

Beside her, Wren shuddered. “Do you think he killed her?”

There was no need to ask who. The woman who had been babbling about how they kill babies here had fallen silent after a heavy thud.

“He didn’t shoot her,” Olive whispered.