Yes, please, Bex thought. But they are both currently in the middle of a hostage standoff.

If only it were that simple to rescue Wren. She couldn’t imagine what Hugh was feeling right now, but she had to believe in him. He’d have a plan. Hugh always had a plan. He was the one she called when the toilets in her house all stopped working at once, like a cosmic plot. He trapped the skunk that had taken up residence under her ancient Mini Cooper. He ran toward the scream of a burglar alarm, when everyone else was fleeing. There was nothing that rattled him, no challenge too daunting.

She suddenly remembered him, fifteen or sixteen, riveted by a comic book and completely ignoring her. Only when Bex grabbed it from him did he look up. Damn, Hugh had said, one syllable with equal parts shock, respect, and sadness. They killed off Superman.

What if she lost him? What if she lost them both?

“Can you turn on the television?” she asked.

The nurse pressed a button on a remote control and then settled it underneath Bex’s palm. On every local channel there was a live report about the Center. Bex stared at the screen, at the orange Creamsicle stucco of the building, the ribbons of police tape blocking it off.

She couldn’t see Hugh.

So she closed her eyes and sketched him in her imagination. He was silhouetted by the sun, and he was larger than life.

Bex could still remember the first time she realized that Hugh was taller than she was. She had been in the kitchen, making dinner, and had dragged a chair toward the cabinet so that she could reach the dried basil on the highest shelf. From behind her, Hugh had just plucked it off its rack.

In that moment, Bex realized everything was different. Hugh had grown up, and somehow she had gone from taking care of him to becoming the one who was being taken care of.

“Well,” she had said. “That’s handy.”

He’d been fourteen. He’d shrugged. “Don’t get used to it,” Hugh had said. “I won’t be here forever.”

Bex had watched him jog up the stairs to his room. And then, soon after, she had watched him go to college, fall in love, move into his own home.

No matter how many times you let someone go, it never got any easier.

—

HUGH HUNG UP THE PHONE. “I’m going in,” he announced. “Alone. He wants a hostage? He can have me.”

“Absolutely not,” Quandt said, turning to a member of his team. “Jones, get your team to—”

Hugh ignored him and started walking. Quandt grabbed Hugh’s arm and spun him around.

“If you storm in there, there will be casualties,” Hugh said. “I am the only one he trusts. If I can get him to walk out with me, it’s a win.”

“And if you can’t?” the commander argued.

“I won’t condone an action that risks my daughter,” Hugh snapped. “So where does that leave us?” His fury was a shimmering curtain, but there were glimpses of what he was hiding behind it.

The two men stopped, staring at each other, a standoff. Finally, Hugh glanced away. “Joe,” he said, his voice broken. “You got kids?”

The SWAT leader looked down at the ground. “I’m here to do a job, Hugh.”

“I know.” Hugh shook his head. “And I know I should have walked away as soon as I found out Wren was inside. God knows this is hard enough when you don’t have a personal stake. But I do. And I can’t sit on the sidelines, not if she’s in there. If you won’t do this for me, will you do it for her?”

Quandt took a deep breath. “One condition. I get a couple of snipers into position first,” he said.

Hugh held out his hand, and the men shook. “Thank you.”

Quandt met his gaze. “Ellie and Kate,” he said, just loud enough for Hugh to hear. “Twins.”

He turned away, calling over two of his men and pointing to the roof of a building across the street and a spot on top of the clinic. As they strategized, Hugh walked back underneath the tent. He saw the young detective who had brought him news of Bex. “Collins,” he called. “Over here.”

She hurried to the command tent. “Yes, sir?”

“That patient in the hospital—Bex McElroy, my sister? I need you to give a note to her.”

The detective nodded, waiting while Hugh sat down at his makeshift desk. He picked up a pen and ripped a page off his legal pad.

What did you say to the woman who’d basically raised you? The one who had nearly died today only because she had been trying to help his own daughter?

He thought of a dozen things he could tell Bex.

That she was the only one who laughed at his terrible dad jokes, the ones that made Wren cringe. That if he was on death row, his last meal would be her chicken Parmesan. That he could still remember her making shadow puppets on his bedroom wall, trying to bribe him to go to sleep. That, at age eight, he hadn’t known what the Savannah College of Art was—or even that she had given up her scholarship to come take care of him when their mother went to dry out—but that he wished he’d said thank you.

But Hugh had never been good at putting his feelings into sentences. It was what had led him to this very point, this very instant.

So he wrote down a single word and passed it to the detective.

Goodbye.

—

LOUIE WARD WAS UNCONSCIOUS, AND in the ocean of his memory, he was not a fifty-four-year-old ob-gyn but a young boy growing up beneath a canopy of Spanish moss, trying to catch crawfish before they caught him. He had been raised to love Jesus and women, in precisely that order. In southern Louisiana, he was reared by two ladies—his grandmama and Mama—living in a small cottage that was, as his grandmother pointed out, still a palace if the Lord dwelled there among you. He was a practicing Catholic, as was everyone else he knew, the result of a long-dead white landowner who had come from France with a rosary in his pocket and who had baptized all his slaves. Louie had been a sickly child, too skinny and too smart for his own good. He had wheezy lungs that kept him from tagging along with the other kids, who snuck at midnight into nearby houses rumored to be haunted, to see what they might find. Instead he followed his grandmama to Mass every day and he helped Mama with her piecework, using tweezers to pinch tiny links into gold chains that wound up around the necks of rich white women.

Louie had never met his father, and knew better than to ask about him since his grandmama referred to him as the Sinner, but whatever hole his father’s absence had left in him was, by age nine, well plastered over.

Louie knew how to open doors for ladies and to say please and thank you and yes, ma’am. He slept on a cot in the kitchen that he made with tight hospital corners, and helped kept the house tidy, because as his grandmama had taught him, Jesus was coming at any moment and they’d best all be ready. Mama had spells where she could not muster the courage to get out of bed, and sometimes spent weeks cocooned there, crying. But even when Louie was alone, he was never alone, because all the ladies in the neighborhood held him accountable for his behavior. It was child raising by committee.

Old Miss Essie came and sat on their porch every day. She told Louie about her daddy, a slave who had escaped his plantation by swimming through the bayou, braving the alligators because relinquishing his body to them would at least have been his decision. He had not only survived with all his limbs, he had hidden along the Natchez Trace, moving only by the light of the moon and following the instructions of everyday saints who had helped others get free. Eventually he had reached Indiana, married a woman, and had Miss Essie. She would lean forward, her eyes bright, and hammer home the moral of this story. Boy, she told Louie, don’t you let nobody tell you who you can’t be.

Miss Essie knew everything about everybody, so it was no surprise that she could tell tales about Sebby Cherise, the hedge witch rumored to be descended from the voodoo priestess Marie Laveau. What was a surprise was that Louie’s mama had been the one doing the asking. The bayou could be easily split between those who believed in gris-gris and those who believed in the Lord, and Grandmama had set her family squarely in the latter camp. Louie had no idea what his mama could possibly want from Sebby Cherise.

His mama was the most beautiful woman in the world, with sad eyes you fell into, and a voice that sanded all your rough edges. For the past few months he’d noticed that she hadn’t cried, and instead had been rising as if helium were pulsing through her veins. She hummed when she wasn’t aware, melodies woven through her braids. Louie rode the outskirts of her good mood.

When Mama knelt beside him and asked if he could keep a secret, he would have followed her to Hell and back. Which, as it turned out, was not that far from the mark.