This was not Lexie Pine. Lexie was dead. But oh, I knew this broken girl. I knew her face.

The white rectangle that she held, it was not a clutch purse. It was a flat white envelope. Exactly like the one Coral sent me. It was even now falling to the ground as she dropped it, the gun she had hidden behind it aimed and ready.

Her shadow hit us. At the bar Mills was already in motion. Trey started to glance behind him.

“Kelly, wait!” It was all I had time to say before the boom of gunfire filled the courtyard.

Her bullets hit Trey like punches to his back—one, two, three—knocking him forward into the table. Trey looked so surprised. At almost the same moment, red bloomed between Kelly’s breasts, knocking her back, and her arms jerked her gun off target. Her next bullet kicked up a tuft of grass.

There was now a steady rhythm of unendurable sound, Mills and then Maxwell firing in short, controlled bursts. Her white dress bloomed with more red poppies as she fell backward, dropping her gun as Trey grabbed the tablecloth and slid sideways out of his chair, pulling our drinks and the little dish of olives as he went.

He lay on his back on the green grass. I stared at my husband, frozen. He looked perfect, his white shirt pristine, tie still knotted. Unharmed. Her bullets must have stopped somewhere inside him.

“Kelly!” I said again. Now I was rising, but in such slow motion. I felt my legs knocking my own chair over. In my peripheral vision, I saw our fancy-haired waiter moving so much faster than I could, blanching, screaming, turning to run, dropping the cheese plate he was bringing us.

“We’re security! Security!” I heard Mills yelling.

I was trying to untangle my feet from my fallen chair. I had to get to Trey. He stared up, blue eyes meeting mine. He was not afraid. He looked, if anything, surprised.

I dropped to all fours behind the table, but by the time I landed, the gunfire had already stopped. I heard people running and screaming, a cacophony of panic all around me.

Maxwell yelled, “Hold your fire, you fucking moron!”

I saw my purse beside me, a huge leather bag, its wide mouth gaping open. I had to get to Trey. And yet my purse mattered. It mattered because I had daughters. Trey had daughters. Why these two thoughts came together, I had no idea, but my wise hand understood. My hand reached out, and then Coral’s white envelope was in it. I saw Kelly’s name and her address in Gadsden written in Coral’s crabbed, dark hand. The envelope felt thick with photos. My wise hand folded it away into my bag.

Then I crawled toward my husband.

To my left a chalk-faced citizen had pulled his own gun out of his jacket and was swiveling it from Kelly Wilkerson’s body to our ex-soldiers, its wobbling black gaze passing over Trey, then me as he turned.

“Holster your goddamn gun before I put you down!” Maxwell yelled, Mills chiming in, “We’re security! It’s safe now!”

I crawled to Trey. Leaned over him. His eyes were wide, still meeting mine. His mouth jerked open, sucking at the air. Just past him Kelly Wilkerson lay in a twisted heap of crimson, the blood still spreading, staining more and more of her white dress. Her eyes met mine as well, no longer holding anger. No longer holding anything.

“Trey,” I said.

“I’m cold,” he told me. He choked, and red blood, the first of his I’d seen, came trickling out the corner of his mouth.

I grasped his shoulders, leaned down close, my hair tumbling around his face. His breath pulled in and out, raspy and desperate. Should I turn him over? I could put my hands over the holes, try to keep the wet, red life from pumping out of him. But his hands clutched feebly at my arms.

“Bree?” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I know, baby. It’s okay. I’m here with you. I’m with you, do you understand?” I said, and God, I meant it. I leaned down to kiss his dear, dear face. “Hold on.”

His grasp failed. His fingers fell away. He said, “I’m so, so sorry.”

“We’ll work it out. I love you,” I said. Again I meant it. Both of these things were true. Then I told him, “You’re going to be all right.”

Even as I said the words, I knew. I knew I was a liar.

27

Bree only talked about it once.

Not Trey. Marshall and Bree talked about Trey all the time, keeping his memory alive for his children, same way they both told Betsy stories for Cara.

And they talked about Coral, and Lexie, and Kelly Wilkerson, though the more honest of these conversations never happened when the children were around. Bree said to him, over and over, how much she wished she’d obeyed Coral one more time; Coral had told her to call Kelly. Bree believed she should have called Kelly right after her own envelope came. Coral had not explicitly told Bree that she was also sending Kelly a letter, but Bree felt she should have guessed that. And she’d known, they both had, how unstable and angry Kelly was.

Kelly’s envelope had arrived the day after Bree’s. When she saw the pictures, read the letter, she waited until her husband came home for lunch, and then she shot him five times. She put the gun inside a pillow to muffle the shots. While he bled out, she coolly showered, changed, made up her pretty face, and then reloaded.

Marshall believed that Kelly had not meant to survive long after Trey. She’d dressed herself beautifully, the way some suicides did, then looked up Trey on the Internet and driven straight to Atlanta to lie in wait for him in the parking garage outside his job.

In the spring, when she got melancholy, Bree would say, “If only I’d reached out to her. Coral said I should. Coral told me, when you get your letter . . .” A thousand times she fell silent, and then she’d sigh and tell him, “Trey should have apologized to her.” He wouldn’t know if she meant Kelly or Lexie or both. He thought that Kelly and Lexie sometimes became the same person in her head.

So it wasn’t like she stuffed it down. She talked about all that shit: Robert’s kidnapping, Spence’s death, Coral, everything. She’d discussed it endlessly with both Marshall and her therapist. She still did.

But the lamb thing. That? She only said it once.

It was St. Alban’s winter break, right at the end of February. In Georgia it already felt like spring. Bree hated it when the air turned warm each year. Hated the transition that reminded her the anniversary was coming. Every year it felt as if spring came a little earlier, making the warm march to the anniversary stretch out even longer. That was probably true, Marshall thought. The world cooking to death.