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Leaving Carrie’s room, Luke went down the hall to talk with investigators. Some were from Oklahoma.

He wanted to speak with Joyce-Anne. He’d learned that while Clay had held her captive, he’d sexually assaulted her several times. Arlo Gemsen, a barrel-chested man, stepped into the hall from his daughter’s room. After a quick introduction, Gemsen, eyes burning with anger and sadness, looked Luke over.

“So, you worked with Clay Smith and you never knew he was a monster?”

Luke absorbed the question like a deserved gut punch that winded him mentally. Forces of nature, he thought. For Gemsen’s question was as crystalline as lightning, but the answer, as elusive as a falling star.

“No, sir. No one knew.”

“And you struck my daughter with your car, then left the scene?”

“Yes, sir. It’s complicated, but yes, sir, I did.”

Gemsen pushed down on the emotions seething in him, thought for a few seconds, nodded, then went back into Joyce-Anne’s room for a moment.

Then he returned.

“Okay, she’ll hear you out.”

Small lacerations laced Joyce-Anne’s face; her hair was pulled into a ponytail with a pink scrunchie. An IV tube was fixed to her left arm. Her mother, Katherine, sat in the chair beside her. Luke noticed a Bible on the bedside table.

After introducing himself, Luke related everything he’d done to find Joyce-Anne after the night of the accident.

“I’m sorry for hitting you and leaving without reporting it,” Luke said. “We might have found you sooner.”

Joyce-Anne and her parents were silent until her mother said, “If you had acted faster, Deputy Conway, and did the right thing from the start, we wouldn’t have come this close to losing her.”

Luke swallowed hard.

“I’m sorry for all of it.”

Joyce-Anne put her scraped hands together, touching her fingertips to her lips. Eyes welling, she nodded.

Arlo Gemsen indicated the door. “You can leave now. This is not easy for us.”