Beth wondered if anyone would be brave enough to point out that he was the cause of the delay. But no.

“Yes, we’re ready, Your Honor,” Mandy said.

“Indeed,” the prosecutor said.

The judge slipped on a pair of reading glasses and read the complaint out loud. Beth’s name wasn’t part of it, just her initials.

“Do you understand what’s going on here today?” the judge asked.

Beth shook her head.

“This proceeding is being recorded, ma’am,” the judge prompted. “You need to answer the question audibly.”

“Not really,” she murmured.

“Well, pursuant to Mississippi Code section 97-3-37, section 1, and Mississippi Code section 97-3-19, section D, you’re being charged with homicide for intentionally causing the death of a child in utero. Under our state law, murder is defined as the killing of a human being without the authority of law when done with deliberate design to effect the death of the person killed. Also under our state law, the term human being includes an unborn child in every stage of gestation, from conception to live birth. The charge is punishable by imprisonment for not more than twenty years or a fine of not more than seventy-five hundred dollars or both, because your conduct resulted in the miscarriage of that child.”

Twenty years? thought Beth. Seventy-five hundred dollars? Both numbers were incomprehensible.

“The only miscarriage here, Your Honor, is a miscarriage of justice,” Mandy interrupted.

He leveled a glance at her. “I do suggest you watch yourself, Miz DuVille.” To Beth he added, “How do you plead?”

“I can explain—”

“No,” Mandy instructed. “Beth, I know you have things to say, but don’t tell them to anyone but me. I can keep what you tell me private. They can’t. All you have to do now is say guilty or not guilty.”

“Not guilty,” she whispered.

“Where are the parents? Who brought her here?” the judge asked.

Beth waited for someone to ask her; they were acting like she wasn’t even there. “Damned if I know,” Willie Cork said.

“Your bail recommendation, Counselor?”

“Given the serious nature of this violent crime against a voiceless, unborn child, and given the grave indifference that the perpetrator seems to show, I would request that she be held without bail pending trial.”

“You bastard,” Mandy muttered.

“I beg your pardon, Miz DuVille?” The judge raised a brow.

“I said he must be plastered. To think that.” She waved an arm in Beth’s general direction. “I’d respectfully request to waive a bail argument until my client is transported to jail. This isn’t grave indifference, Your Honor. This is shock. This defendant is a child, Your Honor. A seventeen-year-old child, who had an abortion in the confines of her own home.”

“My God, you yourself were once in the same position as that poor defenseless baby,” Willie argued. “The difference is that you were given a chance to exist.”

“Your Honor, if it please the court, may I say something?”

Judge Pinot settled more heavily on his swivel chair. “Something tells me you’re gonna whether I say yes or not.”

Mandy faced the prosecutor. “Willie, you can stand on top of Mount Everest and shout that life begins at conception all you want, but if this hospital was burning down and you had to decide between saving a fertilized egg in the IVF lab or a baby in the maternity ward, which would you choose?”

“That’s a false equivalence—”

“Which would you choose?” Mandy repeated.

“Nobody is trying to say it’s all right to kill a child in place of an embryo. This is about allowing the embryo to be born and—”

“Exactly. Thank you for proving my point. No one truly believes that an embryo is equivalent to a child. Not biologically. Not ethically. Not morally.”

For a moment, the room was still. Then Willie said, “Unfortunately for you, the state of Mississippi does believe they’re equivalent.” He flicked his eyes toward Beth. “There is no distinction in the law between whether she killed a grown adult or a fetus—”

“Allegedly killed,” Mandy murmured by rote.

“—except that had she murdered an adult, he could have cried for help.”

The judge cleared his throat. “Miz DuVille, we are a court of law, and in this state all that need concern us is that the child that was in the defendant’s body is now dead, and she was the proximate cause. For this reason I am setting bail at five hundred thousand dollars. The defendant will have twenty-four-hour-surveillance while she is in the hospital, and upon discharge, she will be released to the county jail. Court is adjourned.” He hefted himself out of the chair and pushed past everyone else with the bailiff close on his heels. At the door, he turned to Beth. “And you, young lady—may God have mercy on you.”

Beth was a devout Christian. She had worshipped Jesus, she had prayed to Him, she had trusted Him.

She believed in God.

She had her doubts, though, about whether God believed in her.

—

IT HAD BEEN NEARLY AN hour since Izzy put the chest tube into Bex, and she was running out of time. So much blood had drained out that it had soaked through two towels.

“Favor,” Bex said.

Izzy leaned down. “Anything.”

“You tell my niece …” she wheezed. “That this isn’t her fault.”

“You’re going to tell her yourself, Bex.”

A smile played over her lips, a shadow behind her pain. “I think we both know that isn’t so,” she said. She closed her eyes, and a tear slid down her cheek. “I wish I could tell him what I know. It’s not the goodbye that hurts the most. It’s the hole you’re left with.”

Izzy stared at her. She knew what it felt like to go without; it had been the guiding premise of her childhood. But she had never been what was missing. Once she told Parker it was over, she would be, though. Breaking someone’s heart, it seemed, caused equal damage to your own.

She didn’t know anything about Bex, except for the fact that she was an artist, and that she had a niece who was somehow still miraculously hidden. Bex’s life was a thread in someone else’s tapestry, and that was really all that mattered.

Izzy stood up and approached the shooter. “This woman is going to die without medical help,” she said.

“Then fix her.”

“I’ve done what I can, but I’m not a surgeon.”

She looked around the waiting room. It had gotten painfully silent since he had smacked Janine across the brow and knocked her out. Joy was sitting with her. Janine had stirred a few times, so Izzy knew she wasn’t dead. “I heard you on the phone,” Izzy blurted out.

“What?”

“You know what it’s like to lose someone you love.” She stared into his empty eyes. “All of us, we have families, too. Please. We have to get her to a hospital.”

Before she could wonder if he would listen or shoot her, the phone rang.

—

THE FIRST TIME GEORGE REALIZED he was a superhero, Lil was only six months old. They had both gotten sick with the flu, and exhausted, George let her sleep next to him. But her fever had broken sometime before his, and she woke up and started to roll off the edge of the mattress. Even though he would have sworn he had still been asleep, George’s hand snapped out and grabbed the baby by her foot before she could fall.

He supposed that all fathers were like that. There was the time she was a toddler and got her foot stuck in the narrow slats of a fence in the pastor’s backyard. Earlene had been babysitting while George had gone to get some fertilizer for the church gardens, and when he came back for Lil, he’d heard her hysterical cries. George was out of the car before he’d even finished slamming it into park. Earlene had tried everything and was in tears herself. “I’ve called 911,” she told him, trying to soothe the baby.

“Fuck 911,” George said, and he smashed through the slats with his fist, grabbing Lil and cradling her against him even as his bleeding hand stained her dress.

Some of the hurts in the world weren’t even physical. When Lil was eight, some little shit of a boy in Sunday School told her she couldn’t play pirates with them because she was a girl. He had done for Lil what Pastor Mike did for him when he thought he was worth nothing.

He began by pretending he had forgotten how to turn on the stove to boil the water for the spaghetti. “Dad,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You just turn the knob!”

“Can you show me?”

And she did.

Then he pretended that he couldn’t remember how to use a hammer correctly. She curled her hand around his and patiently explained how to hit the nail, just a few taps at first, so that you didn’t hurt yourself.

He pretended that he didn’t know how to replace a lightbulb, how to clean the fishbowl, how to mix plaster, how to fly a kite. A few months later, they went to a church fair. “I don’t think I remember the way back to the cotton candy,” he told Lil. He held out his hand, but this time, she shook her head.