When Janine was finished, her hands black with dirt, she sat down in the backyard and sobbed. That was how her mother found her when she got home from work. She was inconsolable, and everyone in her family thought they knew why.

It turned out that if you surgically removed a memory, you might stop feeling for the edges of its scar. You might even come to believe that you had never been raped, had never been pregnant, had never gotten an abortion. The more distance that grew between that day and Janine’s future, the more she believed that she was different from other women who had found themselves with an unwanted pregnancy. She had been the victim. She had whitewashed the stain with years of pro-life activism. She didn’t think of herself as a hypocrite. That thing inside her had not been a baby. It was something they’d left behind.

Janine had pretended to think that if she never told a soul where she had been that afternoon, it would be like it hadn’t happened. But of course, God knew. And that was why this shooting was her fault.

Coming here undercover had been a bad idea. It was as if the Center were Pandora’s box. She’d opened the door, and had released all the evil into the world.

—

NINETY-NINE PERCENT OF HUGH’S JOB as a hostage negotiator involved being a good listener, but this hadn’t always been a skill he possessed. When he and Annabelle broke up, she had accused him of constantly interrupting her and not taking her feelings into account. “That’s ridiculous,” he had blustered, cutting her off midsentence. Annabelle had held up her hands, as if to say, I told you so. The space between them had filled with shock, with Hugh’s bitter realization that she was right. “Maybe if you’d let me finish a thought,” Anna said into the silence, “I wouldn’t have had to find someone else who did.”

Hugh had not become a negotiator until after Annabelle left him. But he was bound and determined not to make the same mistake in his professional life that he had in his private one. He had been trained to stay calm, even when his adrenaline was pumping. He knew to keep his voice even, to stay engaged with what a person was saying, attuned to every detail.

He knew, too, to acknowledge when someone else spoke. To accept. To say, all right, yes, okay. But he did not say I understand, because he understood nothing, particularly what brought any particular person to any particular cliff.

It had always been easier for Hugh to be measured and dispassionate during a hostage standoff than it had been with Annabelle. He supposed it was because at work, he had nothing personal at stake.

Until now.

“McElroy.” He turned at the sound of the chief’s voice. “What the holy fuck is going on?”

Chief Monroe was still dressed in his coat and tie from his luncheon. “Hostage situation,” Hugh said. “I already called in the SWAT team, and we have a name and address. George Goddard.”

“Any priors?”

“No. It seems to be a personal grudge, based on information from an eyewitness.”

He did not say the words that were on the tip of his tongue: The two people I love most in the world are in there. I don’t trust anyone but me to get them out. The minute he admitted that, he would be booted off this case. But luckily, part of Hugh’s training was knowing how to lie convincingly.

The chief looked from the cordoned-off clinic to the line of policemen securing the perimeter. “You tell me what you need,” he said, ceding authority to Hugh.

“I’m good, for now,” Hugh said, and he lifted a megaphone that had come from one of the cruisers.

He was not a fan of throw phones—heavy Gator cases that were typically delivered to the front door via an armored vehicle. The cops would retreat while the gunman took in the box and lifted the receiver. Instead, he just needed the shooter to know that he was going to be the one calling him.

“Hello,” he boomed. “This is Detective Lieutenant Hugh McElroy of the Jackson Police. I’m going to call the landline in there in one minute.” He held up his cellphone, in case anyone was watching through the mirrored windows.

In the silence that followed his words, Hugh could hear the symphony of June bugs and the throaty contralto of cars on the highway in the distance. He imagined Wren, hidden in a closet, straining to hear his voice. He was addressing the shooter, but in his heart, he was speaking directly to his daughter.

“I just want to talk,” Hugh said, and then he put down the megaphone, and dialed.

—

GEORGE HAD ALWAYS BELIEVED HIMSELF to be an honorable man—a good Christian, a good father. But what about when being good got you nowhere? When you were still lied to, shit on, when nobody listened to you?

They’d listen, now.

As if he’d willed it, a tinny, amplified voice seeped through the walls of the clinic. This is Detective Lieutenant Hugh McElroy of the Jackson Police.

He felt it: the electrified optimism that sizzled through the group. Help had arrived. They were not alone.

George had known, on some subconscious level, that it would come to this: someone would come to save these people. It was up to him to save himself.

Once, as a kid, George had found a bloody trail in the woods and traced it to an illegal trap, where a coyote had chewed its own leg off to escape. For months after that he had woken up sweating in the middle of the night, haunted by that severed paw. He’d wondered if the coyote had lived. If it was worth making a sacrifice that great for a fresh start.

He didn’t blame Lil. She was a child, for God’s sake. She didn’t know what she was doing. He could easily lay fault at the feet of the people in this clinic who had done it to her.

The pistol felt like an extension of his arm, like his own limb. He couldn’t chew it off and hope to survive. This was a trap of his own making.

On the reception desk, beneath the glitter of shattered glass, the phone began to ring.

—

IT WAS THE MODERN-DAY EQUIVALENT of the trolley problem, that old ethics conundrum. There’s a trolley whose brakes have failed barreling down a track. Ahead are five people who are unable to move, and the trolley is going to hit them. You have the ability to pull a lever and swing the trolley to an alternate track. However, on that track is a single person who is similarly unable to move. Do you let the trolley stay on course and kill five people? Or do you pull the lever and kill one person who would otherwise have been safe?

Until today, Hugh would have said that the lesser of two evils would be the loss of a single life, rather than five lives. But things changed when you had your hand on that lever and the doomed person on the alternate track was someone you loved.

It was as if Bex was on one track and Wren on another. What if trying to engage the shooter via negotiation took so much time that Bex, injured, didn’t survive? What if he attempted to get Bex help quickly, disarming the situation via force, and wound up putting Wren in the line of fire?

Hugh dialed the number of the Center and listened to it ring, and ring, and ring. He knew, thanks to Wren, that the lack of response was not because everyone inside had been killed, including the gunman. So he hung up, and waited a moment before dialing again.

When Wren was born, Hugh had been sure there was something wrong with him. He just couldn’t get excited about a drooling, pooping bundle of flesh. Even when people came over to exclaim at her big blue eyes or her thick head of hair, he smiled and nodded and secretly thought she looked like a tiny alien. Of course he adored her. He would have laid down his life for her. He understood the duty that came with being a parent, but not the visceral pull he’d heard others describe.

Just you wait, Bex had told him, and like always, she was right.

That miracle had happened when Wren was three and her nursery school teacher casually mentioned how cute it was that she and a little boy named Saheed played house together. Who’s Saheed? he had asked that day, driving her home. Oh, Wren had said. My boyfriend.

The first time he had seen Wren on the playground, holding hands with Saheed, Hugh had very clearly felt the world shift. That was the moment he realized that Wren did not belong to him. In fact, Hugh belonged to her.

One day, she would not need him to help her decide if she should wear leggings with candy corn on them, or penguins. One day, she would remember all the words to “Bohemian Rhapsody” without him filling in the gaps as they sang along in the car. One day she wouldn’t ask him to get the Goldfish crackers from a shelf she could not reach. One day she would not need him anymore.

Sometimes you can’t tell how consuming love is until you can see its absence. Sometimes you can’t recognize love because it’s changed you, like a chimera, so slowly that you didn’t witness the transformation.