Mom called about her Labor Day cookout: "Your partner and her kids aren't welcome. The cousins don't need to see that." So I stayed home and grilled for my real family. I said nothing. At 7 PM, Mom called me, screaming: "Where did everyone go?"

The rain had settled into a steady, gray drizzle by the time we reached the courthouse steps.

The granite was slick with wet oak leaves, the wind coming off the north hills smelling of winter. Down on the sidewalk, three city buses were idling, their diesel exhaust hanging low in the humid air, mixing with the smell of wet limestone and roasting coffee from the shop across the square.

Sandy was five paces behind us.

She hadn't taken the elevator; she had come down the three flights of stairs with a fast, jerky trot, her low heels clattering against the marble like hail on a tin roof.

"Lee!" she shouted as we cleared the bronze entrance doors.

She didn't use my name this time. She went straight for the woman who had never raised her voice to her.

Lee stopped on the second landing, her boots set wide on the wet granite, her hand still holding mine. She didn't turn around with an attitude; she turned with the patient, unhurried posture she used when an unruly patient was screaming in the emergency triage bay.

"Yes, Mrs. Vance?" Lee said.

Sandy stood on the top step, the rain already flattening the lacquered curls on her forehead, her navy blue skirt clinging to her stockings. Her Bible was tucked under her arm, the black leather dark with grease from her gloves.

"You think you won," Sandy hissed, her eyes wild, the mascara running in two thin, gray trails down the corners of her mouth. "You think you came into my family and tore it up and you’re going to walk away with my grandbabies. But I’ll tell you something, Lee Ann: the blood doesn't wash out. You can change the names on the court papers, you can put that boy in your truck, but every time he looks in the looking glass, he’s going to see Travis Calloway’s eyes looking back at him. And every time he looks at you, he’s going to know you’re the one who stole him from his people."

Lee didn't flinch.

She looked at Sandy for four full seconds—not with anger, not with spite, but with that cold, deep, unshakeable pity that a woman who works for a living feels for someone who has never done anything harder than sit on a sofa and judge the weather.

"Mrs. Vance," Lee said, her voice clear and carrying through the rain all the way to the bus stop, "when Bo looks in the looking glass, he’s going to see an eight-year-old boy whose mama stood between him and a fist. And when he looks at me, he’s going to see the person who taught him how to keep the saw straight on the line."

She turned back toward the steps, her fingers tightening around mine.

"Now go home, Sandy," Lee added, not looking back. "Before the sheriff decides that thousand-foot line starts right here on the sidewalk."

A horn tapped twice from the curb across the street.

It wasn't a cruiser.

It was Wayne’s old Ford F-150, its rusted rocker panel dripping red water onto the asphalt, idling by the fire hydrant with the wipers slapping their dry, rhythmic beat against the glass.

The driver’s side door didn't open.

The passenger door opened three inches, then swung wide. Wayne was sitting behind the wheel, his gray hat pulled down to his ears, his two hands resting on the steering column, looking straight ahead through the windshield at the courthouse wall.

He didn't look at Sandy. He didn't look at me.

He had left the passenger door open, an invitation that carried no warmth, no apology, and no promise. Just an open cab and forty miles of two-lane highway back to an empty house on Elm Street where the phone didn't ring anymore.

Sandy looked at the truck.

She looked at the open door, then at Lee, then at me.

Her chin gave one short, involuntary jerk—a tiny, pathetic twitch of her lower lip that showed the yellowed enamel of her teeth—before she pulled her handbag tight against her stomach, put her head down against the drizzle, and walked down the steps.

She climbed into the passenger seat without a word.

The door slammed shut with that loose, hollow, tinny rattle that old Fords have when the hinges are worn down to the pins.

Wayne didn't wait for her to buckle her belt. He pulled the gearshift down, the transmission groaned, and the truck pulled out into the midday traffic, its rusted tailpipe coughing a single, pale plume of blue smoke that drifted across the wet street and vanished into the rain.

Clara Morales stepped out of the courthouse doors behind us, tucking her leather binder into her briefcase with a sharp, metallic snap of the brass locks.

"Dawn," she said, looking over her glasses.

"Yes, Clara?"

"The certified copies of the order will be delivered to the school district, the county sheriff, and the Republic police department before three o'clock," she said. "The protection order is registered in the state database under the federal full-faith-and-credit provision. If Travis Calloway so much as drives past the end of Farm Road 142 on his way to Arkansas, he goes to the state penitentiary in Cameron for three years on a felony detainer."