Marshall swallowed the last of his toast. “I agree it’s not a bluff. She’s after blood.” He was remembering Spence, too, I thought. The pills she’d convinced me were roofies. “But she knows this place intimately. With the bird’s-eye view she has, she can see the parking lot. I bet she can see the road, too, for miles, and it’s the only way in. Maybe there’s hiking trails, but she knows those, too. Meanwhile she’s told us she’s leaving the baby elsewhere and driving to meet us. So if we, for example, send cops in early to set up an ambush, she’s already there, watching them arrive. If she sees or hears anyone but you and Trey, she has plenty of time to—” His voice cut out abruptly. He didn’t want to say what she would do, but he didn’t have to. By the time the police made their way to the hidey-hole, they would find only the bodies.

Trey had gotten up while Marshall spoke. He was pacing, jittery from caffeine and sleeplessness and waiting. “You think she would leave Robert alone in that cabin when she comes to meet Bree? What if you get to the cabin and Lexie is there. Armed. With our kid.”

I answered first. “She won’t have Lexie anywhere nearby. Period.”

Not only because we could send the police and she wanted to keep Lexie’s hands clean. Of all the things she’d told me, that one had the most of my faith. But because she wouldn’t ask Lexie to harm a baby. What Coral had done to Geoff had a ricochet. Coral had felt it. She wouldn’t want her frail, newly sober child to do that. I knew it deep in my own motherhood, so solid and strong that I’d bet Robert’s life on it. Not that I had another choice.

We spent our last hours chewing it over, the three of us, back and forth and around and around. Trey was mutinous. He hated the idea of me walking up alone to meet with her while he sat all the way down the hill in the car in relative safety.

I didn’t want Trey to come, period. I was afraid she’d kill him outright, but Marshall said she would have to be a marine sharpshooter to pick Trey off from the top of the hill. But what if she got lucky? Or what if she saw us coming and walked down to the parking lot to meet us with a shotgun? Trey said there was no way in hell he was sitting home, though, and Marshall agreed. Coral needed to see Trey arrive. We had to look like we were complying. We argued about that until it was almost time to go, recycling the same points and fears and hopes without making any headway, churning fruitlessly. Marshall’s plan won out.

Marshall looked relieved and also a little sick. We were betting so much on his gut instinct. If he was wrong . . . Still, his gut instinct had gotten us this far. I couldn’t see clearly past any moment where Marshall was wrong, so he wasn’t wrong, and that was all. Our course was set.

As we got up to leave, Trey said, “We should take your car. It has the base of Robert’s car seat.”

I nodded, moved to near tears by his implication. Taking the car-seat base was an act of such deliberate hope that it made me think of Kelly Wilkerson, with her past-tense verbs, her bare walls, her empty, indented carpet. Her son’s small life was over, and he was already wiped entirely away. She seemed almost wiped away as well. Trey was saying I would not become like her, just a body, too full of rage and drugs and grief to hold anything else. Trey was saying we were going to bring our son home.

Marshall got in the backseat, and I put a stack of dark blankets, gray and navy, in beside him. Trey drove. Once we were on the highway, I reached over the gap between the seats to hold his hand. He gripped mine so tight it almost hurt. We didn’t talk much on the drive. No need. We all knew the plan. It was crazy and thin and the only thing we had.

There was little traffic leaving Atlanta this early on a Sunday morning. People were either still in bed or at church. My mother had skipped her own service to let the girls sleep in. She’d forgotten to tell them to put their phones away when she went to bed, and she thought they’d stayed up late. I texted with her a little bit, sending cheery missives about my recovery. She was hoping to keep them long enough for pancake brunch before I came to take them back. I told her that sounded perfect. Both girls slept until eleven, sometimes noon, on weekends. This would all be over before they had so much as stirred.

Thinking of them, tucked up safe together in Mom’s guest room, sleeping in the boneless way of young and growing things, made me long for them, so fierce. I wanted to wake them myself and offer pancakes, smell their warm, sleepy skin and pet their tousled hair back. Their absence felt both normal and insane. They often spent weekends with my mom or with Trey’s parents, getting spoiled while Trey and I ducked out to the Biltmore or up to New York. Now, though, I felt as if a month had passed since I’d seen them, as if I’d abandoned them while focused solely on their brother. I wanted to make it up to them, though they had no idea that there was something to make up.

It would be better to keep it that way. If we could. If we got Robert back. If, if, if. I was so tired of that word.

We made excellent time, getting so ahead of schedule that as we pulled off the interstate, I worried we’d arrive too early. I wanted to do everything exactly right. There was a cluster of stores and gas stations at this exit: Krystal, Chick-fil-A, Dollar General. I asked Trey to pull in at a gas station to use the bathroom and get coffee, but mostly to kill time.

Trey didn’t need the restroom. He stayed by the pumps, topping off my car. Marshall and I headed in. There was a young woman outside by the door. She leaned against the ice machine smoking, though she looked way too young to buy cigarettes legally. She had lank brown hair and a rash of pimples on her forehead that her straggly bangs failed to hide. She straightened as we drew close.

“Hey, ma’am?” she said, to me, only me, and her eyes twitched nervously toward Marshall. I understood why. He looked like a cop. And yet she was desperate enough to talk to me, and so I stopped. “Could you maybe get me something to eat?”

“Sure,” I said. She smiled, and I saw a large black cavity, oval shaped, growing between her two front teeth. “What would you like?”

Marshall cleared his throat, a neutral sound. I ignored it.

She licked her chapped lips. “If you gave me a little money, I could pick. They’ll let me come inside if I can show them I have money.”

“We’ll get you a sandwich,” Marshall said, and instantly her eyes dropped and she stepped back. He took my arm, and I let him tote me inside. When the swinging glass door had swished closed behind us, he told me, “If you give her money, she’ll just buy drugs.”