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“Wow, so surprising you couldn’t handle your emotions so you chickened out and never spoke to him again.” Hannah had earned the sarcasm in her voice. “Is there any other circumstance in your life where you might have made a similar mistake?”

Emmy couldn’t manage a laugh this time. In the twelve years that had slowly marched past, she had never once thought to reach out to Hannah. She had waited and waited for Hannah to make the first move, and now they were here.

“It’s all right,” Hannah said. “Paul made it clear that it was you or him. Looks like we both made the wrong choice. Took me longer to figure it out, though.”

Emmy wiped her nose. She had come here for a reason. “Is that why you’re talking to me now, because you finished things with Paul two months ago?”

Hannah didn’t take the opening. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m literally a captive audience.”

Emmy’s nose wouldn’t stop running. She wiped it with her sleeve. “Myrna always appreciated that you knew how to use the word literally.”

Hannah reached back for the roll of cheap toilet paper beside the toilet. The one-ply had the texture of cardboard. She rolled it out around her hand, then offered it through the bars. Emmy leaned forward. Their fingers touched. They both held on for a few seconds before leaning back.

Hannah said, “If it helps, I finally understand why it was so hard for you to leave Jonah.”

“It wasn’t hard,” Emmy said, though the divorce had felt like death by a thousand petty manipulations. “It’s like you always said. I was too stubborn and too loyal to somebody who wasn’t loyal to me.”

“We both know how he treated you,” Hannah said. “It’s easy to look from the outside and say that you should walk away. But when you’re in it yourself, when you see how much your child needs a father, when you tell yourself the man you fell in love with is still in there somewhere …”

Emmy heard the sadness as her voice trailed off.

“I kept thinking Paul would change back, you know?” Hannah spooled out some toilet paper for herself.

“I thought eventually he would—well, not move on, because you can never move on from losing a child—but I thought he’d find a different way to deal with it.

To realize that he had a living child who needed him.

A wife who needed to mourn alongside him.

But he couldn’t pull himself out of it, and it took me too long to see that he was pulling us down with him.

I waited too long. I should’ve left years ago. It would’ve prevented a lot of pain.”

Emmy tapped her throat again, reminding Hannah to be careful.

“I know,” Hannah said. “But it’s complicated, Em. It’s so much more complicated than I realized, and I’m sorry.”

Emmy felt the familiar tightness in her chest, her body’s way of warning her that she needed to keep her emotions trapped inside. But she couldn’t this time. Not now. Not with Hannah. “It’s my fault, Han. It’s my fault you lost your most precious thing.”

Hannah didn’t offer her absolution. She just smiled her sad smile. “She was precious, wasn’t she?”

Emmy took in a deep breath. She felt the tightness start to release. All these years, she had lived with the sadness, but never once had she been able to share the grief. “She was.”

“The last thing I said to her was to put on some fresh sunscreen. You’d think I’d told her to climb Mount Everest. She just rolled her eyes and stomped off.” Hannah was laughing as she dabbed at her eyes. “You gotta hand it to her. She let herself get sunburned just to spite me.”

Emmy took in another breath. She remembered one of the last times she’d seen Madison. Not floating in the pond. Not even under the oak tree. Emmy was standing in the autopsy suite at GBI headquarters listening to the medical examiner call out the bright red sunburn on the back of Madison’s legs.

“All this with Paisley Walker,” Hannah said. “I keep wondering if Carol’s thinking about the last thing she said to her. Like, was it just another morning, or were they fighting about something, or were they happy or sad?”

Emmy could see that Hannah wasn’t looking for an answer to the question. Jail was nothing if not a place for reflecting on all the bad things that had happened in your life.

“The second Madison hit twelve, we started fighting. Swear to God, all she did was sit around trying to think of ways to make me feel like shit.” Hannah was smiling, but Emmy could recall the exquisite torture of Madison’s insults.

“Then out of nowhere, she’d drop a compliment, like say that my dress was pretty, or my hair looked good, and I’d feel like I won the fucking lottery. ”

Emmy laughed. So did Hannah.

“The thing is, you and I still saw her as a child, but she was only three years away from being an adult. Graduating high school. Going to college. Getting married. Having children of her own. But in that moment, that day she turned fifteen, she was still trying to figure herself out. Testing all the different kinds of people she wanted to be. Pissing me off. Pushing boundaries. Wanting so desperately to be a woman. Still feeling like a child.”

Emmy remembered the sense of limbo from her own teenage years.

“That’s the part that makes me so fucking sad,” Hannah said. “We didn’t really get to meet her. Madison will always be trapped between those two people. The woman we didn’t get to meet, and the girl we used to know.”

Hannah’s sadness filled the room. Emmy couldn’t help but feel it, too.

They weren’t just mourning Madison. They were mourning themselves.

Emmy had lost herself to Jonah’s insecurities.

Hannah had lost herself to Paul’s grief.

Virgil had joked about how raising girls could kill a man, but he had no idea how fucking hard it was to grow yourself into a woman.

“Oh,” Hannah said. She was looking at the door. She’d been imprisoned in this small space for almost thirty hours. Every part of her senses was attenuated to movement on the other side of the glass.

Emmy looked to see who was there. The tightness came back to her chest when she saw Jude. The woman’s scowl was an exact replica of Myrna’s when Emmy had done something stupid or disappointing.

Hannah mocked, “‘Miss Bennet, you ought to know that I am not to be trifled with.’”

Emmy smiled at the Lady Catherine impression, but she knew Jude had her reasons, too. She stood up, telling Hannah, “I’ll see about that pillow.”

Jude stepped back into the sallyport so that Emmy could open the door. Cole’s badge was on a lanyard around her neck.

Emmy asked, “Did you steal that from my son?”

“Are you taking me to task for not following procedure when you just spent twenty minutes tainting the GBI’s case against a suspected cop killer?”

“It was closer to fifteen minutes.”

“You can wipe that smirk off your face,” Jude snapped. “We both know your entire conversation was recorded. There’s no way a jury will see you two joking around and believe that Hannah is guilty. She can’t even be called as a witness now. The prosecutor would be laughed out of the courtroom.”

“Okay.” Emmy fished her badge out of her pocket. “Can you explain to me why Adam Huntsinger’s probation officer called to ask if I wanted Adam put back inside?”

Jude scowled again. “Why did the PO call you? I told Brett to take care of it.”

“Why are you giving my deputies orders?”

“What did you tell Adam’s PO?”

Emmy had to end this game of question ping-pong. “I told him to do whatever he wants because only a fool would weaponize the sheriff’s department against Adam Huntsinger while we’re under intense public scrutiny.”

“So your fifteen minutes with Hannah Dalrymple was …?”

“None of your goddam business.” Emmy waved her badge to open the door. She heard the angry thuds of Jude’s motorcycle boots echoing behind her as they walked down the hallway.

Jude said, “Adam Huntsinger admitted that he had sexual contact with Cheyenne Baker.”

Emmy froze. Her hand had been reaching out to open the next door. The lanyard swung like a pendulum from her laminated badge. She turned around, silently repeating the information in her head so that she could understand it.

Jude said, “He told me that Cheyenne normally charged fifty bucks for a blow job, but they traded for weed.”

Emmy had lost the ability to speak.

“He said she had a lot of customers, that she was saving up her cash, talked a lot about leaving town—no surprise there. He also said that they didn’t do vaginal penetration, but consider the source.”

Emmy started nodding, if only to let Jude know that she was listening.

“He said he never touched Madison. Claimed she was too young for him, but I don’t know about that, either.” Jude reached past Emmy and used Cole’s badge on the door. “Is it left or right?”

“Left,” Emmy managed. The initial shock was starting to wear off.

Now, she didn’t know whether to be envious or impressed that Jude had been in town for less than twenty-four hours and somehow managed to break Adam Huntsinger.

“We heard the rumors that Cheyenne was selling herself for sex. There was no proof, though.”

“What about the source of the drugs?”

“What about it?”

“Adam claims that Woody was using Cheyenne to expand into the North Falls market. Pretty risky, but I imagine the mark-up made it worthwhile. North Falls people would never go down to the truck stop to save ten bucks on an eight ball. It’s the same theory with the sex.

Why pay a seasoned sex worker twenty bucks a blow when you can have a North Falls teenager for fifty?

For a lot of these guys, breaking the taboo is part of their fetish. ”

Emmy cleared her throat. She wasn’t going to ask Jude how she’d managed to get this information out of Adam.

Her sister really was some kind of witch.

“We suspected Woody was Cheyenne’s supplier.

We never had any proof. Virgil tried to get him to voluntarily come into the station for an interview, but he refused. ”