I was three when I first saw my grandmother wipe red prints from my daddy’s boots off the kitchen floor like it was ketchup, not blood he’d brought back from a crime scene.

Seven when I learned that a man my father helped to put in prison hid a poorly constructed bomb under our porch the day after he got out on parole. Ten when I learned to cock a shotgun. Thirteen when I heard a noise and cocked one, alone in the house, and pointed it at the front door until my daddy walked through it.

I turn off the ignition and roll down the window of the truck. The house sits in the night shadows of a sprawling old oak that my uncle and father climbed as little boys, long before Maggie and me. A single light shines on the Texas flag—a big white star on a red, white, and blue field. Easy to draw, easy to love. That’s what my father always said. The flag has hung off the porch of this house since I was little enough to salute it.

My childhood home is known to everybody as the Blue House, not because it is blue—it is the palest of yellows—but because it has housed four generations of cops. It became mine when Daddy died. I couldn’t stand to sell it even though I had three offers without even putting it on the market.

I begged my husband to uproot his Chicago law practice and start our lives in this house five years ago, and he did. Tonight, I’m trying to dig up the courage to ever go in again. Dad is gone. Finn is gone. Where they laid their plates at the kitchen table, the box with the Santa face is now leering.

If Finn were home, warm light would be spilling out the kitchen window into the side alley. He would have found the contents of the Santa box on the kitchen table and spread them out, reminiscing. He would be sucking down a favorite local brew with a clever name—Sex in a Canoe or Blood and Honey.

He would look up at me and ask Are you finally done? He would want to make love without any metal——not my leg, not the key. He hated that tiny, cold reminder of my father banging against his chest.

Whatever was in that brown baggie from my father’s drawer, Finn would pop it open and we’d try to get high on it. He’d turn up the Black Eyed Peas and tell me to let it all go up in the smoke we blew at the ceiling: Trumanell, Wyatt, Daddy, Angel with one eye, this town that turns girls to mythic stone.

Instead, the house bullies me with its history. Its emptiness. It urges me to finish the job. Discover all its secrets. It says, With Finn gone, you have nothing to lose.

Before my grandfather and father, this town’s first sheriff brought up his five children in these rooms. His picture hangs in the front hall, a grim man who looks like he slept in his uniform. His body is now crumbs in the ground at the Whitethorn Cemetery five miles out of town. So is every other single person who was raised under this roof, except for my uncle and me. I’ve been anointed the last of the Blue House line. My uncle broke his noose when he stepped out its door and became a preacher.

I’m glad I didn’t bring Angel here tonight. It would have been selfish. I left her curled up again on Maggie’s couch, Lola’s arm splayed against her chest. We had toasted her brand-new eye with pizza, fizzy grape juice, and messy cupcakes that Lola had a hand in making.

The scene on the couch had screamed safe. Happy. The Blue House sometimes felt happy. It never felt safe. There were knocks on the door in the dead of night. Daddy met every one of them in his plaid robe and slippers with a gun in his hand.

If he stepped on the porch and the door shut behind him, I knew it wasn’t good.

My phone is flashing, urgent, awake on the seat beside me.

For once, I don’t jump for it. I let the call go. I sink back into the seat, into all that regret, wondering what kind of person I am.

Finn made compromises. He ate his cereal every morning with the gloomy company of The Last Supper on the kitchen wall. He nicked his knuckles every time he used my grandmother’s rusted peeler. He made love in a rickety old bed he hated, very carefully, because it shook the old clouded mirror on the wall.

Wyatt would make that mirror on the bedroom wall quake and fall and shatter instead of trying to keep peace with it. He wouldn’t hold me like glass. He would rock my bones until our secrets fell out, the ones we keep from everyone else and the ones we keep from each other.

I’m not saying that this is a good thing for me to want or even that I want it. It is just what I seem to need.

Beside me, the phone keeps flashing.

I’m shoving open the door, my caller ID lighting up the dark entryway.

The word A-hole, glaring at me. My partner.

I lift the phone to my ear. “Hey, Rusty.”

“Where’ve you been? We’ve arrested Wyatt Branson.”

I stop short in the doorway. “When?”

“Five … six hours? He’s asking for you.”

“Why didn’t you call me five hours ago?”

“Are you his keeper? I thought you were on vacation. And he wasn’t asking for you five hours ago. He was drunk.”

“You arrested him on drunk and disorderly? DWI?”

“Yes, but incidental. He was hounding Lizzie Raymond while she walked home from cheerleading practice. You know the girl I’m talking about—the one who looks like Trumanell Branson if you get her in the right light. The girl who was on that documentary. She had a little cheerleader friend with her this time, so there’s a witness to what he said. When you get here, I suggest coming in the back. You’ll see why.”

17

Outside, the crowd is belting out a war cry. Rusty is marching me down to Wyatt’s cell, tossing the keys in his hand, our steps clicking in tandem on the shiny white tile. But we’re not in tandem. Rusty and I both know that sticking my foot in that cell is going to be the point of no return, the official demarcation, and that I might not be able to step back.

Rusty has always been perfectly clear. He believes Wyatt is every evil rolled into one: Ted Bundy slithering around with a handsome face; Perry Smith slaughtering a bucolic farmhouse; Jack the Ripper grinning in his grave and getting away with it.

“Wyatt Branson’s got the fuckin’ long view,” he’d told me five years ago on our first day on the job together. “He’s taken on the role of a lifetime in an off-off-off-off-Broadway play—however fucking off New York is from Texas—and he hopes it runs forever. I can bide my time. But you need to know I’m going to clear the Branson case and close his show.” Rusty loves to speak in extended metaphors.

My father’s support of Wyatt, or mine, wasn’t a secret and it was absolute. So you’d think that Rusty and I would be a bad match. Eventually, we’d part ways. It turned out, Rusty was the only one who volunteered to be my partner. No other cop on the force wanted to be paired with a one-legged rookie girl.

A few years later, over shots of tequila, I asked Rusty if he chose me because he thought I was his ticket to fame. I’d tapped my temple drunkenly, almost missing it. “You think all the answers to Trumanell are in here. That’s why you took on the amputee. That’s why you chose me.”

“I chose you because you go from zero to animal in five seconds when it counts,” he drawled. “And you’re pretty. Useful tools in the cop kit.”

It’s not like he didn’t test me first. He invited me out to his piece of land and watched me shoot holes in a target with a series of six guns he laid out.

He said he heard I had “one of those Oscar Pistorius Olympic blades” and asked if I’d join him on a ten-mile run around the property. When he was finished, doubled over, sucking at the air, he admonished me for trying not to show him up. “I know what you can do. Don’t ever slow down for nobody. If you’re going to try to manipulate somebody like me, do a good job of it. Didn’t your daddy teach you that?”

Wyatt’s slouched on a bench in the squatty cell, head bowed. The chants of the protest in the parking lot are more jarring in here, louder, primed by echo. People in this town know exactly how this jail is laid out. The Wyatt haters are huddled at the corner of the building as close to him as they can get.

When Rusty clangs open the door, Wyatt’s head stays down, lips still moving. Rusty probably thinks Wyatt is faking. I know better. Wyatt’s praying used to draw every girl to him. There was nothing sexier than a boy who could slam any asshole to the ground except a boy who could slam any asshole to the ground and still believe there was something greater in this universe than he was. Believing in God—in an invisible and all-powerful watchman—was one thing Wyatt never lied about.

“Like I said, he hasn’t said a word except to ask for you,” Rusty says. “You don’t have long.” He leans in to my ear. “Remember what you are. A cop. Remember, girls are dying.”