Chapter 16: Put Him Down

Terrence drove with one hand and held his phone to his ear with the other.

I buttoned my dress wrong and fixed it at a red light.

"Where would he take him?" I asked.

"Your house," Terrence said. "It's the only place he's got left."

It was my house too, on a street I had walked down every morning for six years.

Sawyer's truck was in the driveway with the engine ticking.

Every light was on, and he stood on the porch in his dress blues with a boy wrapped in a blanket on his hip.

Sammy had his thumb in his mouth.

A taxi pulled up behind us, and Celia got out of it in her white silk dress with her hair coming down.

She had no mask left at all.

"Give him to me," she said, and ran up the lawn.

"Stay where you are, Celia," Sawyer said, quietly, and she stopped.

Lights were coming on across the street.

A man in a bathrobe stood on his lawn with his phone raised, and then a woman beside him did the same.

Sawyer saw them and did not care.

"Hannah," he said. "Good. I wanted you here. I wanted all of you here."

"Put him down," Terrence said.

"Not yet. We're going to make a trade, and it's a fair one."

He shifted Sammy higher on his arm.

"You go to the chief, Hannah. You tell her you were hysterical, and you misheard the radio, and the east side was unstable after all."

"You tear up the statement from table nine."

"Terrence signs a paper saying he'll never ask the court for my daughter."

"She's not your daughter," I said.

"Then she's nobody's, and nobody's going to want her once the papers get done with her mother." He smiled. "I can keep that off the front page."

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