Chapter 7

The county attorney's office sent two officers. They took Mireille into custody without incident — she had gone quiet, as if the fight had drained out of her in the courtyard, and she walked between them with her silver chignon still immaculate and her coral lips pressed into a thin line. Karel was taken for questioning separately, walking in a daze. He kept looking over his shoulder at the cellar door, as if the earth had opened and swallowed the boy he had helped hide.

Dorsey stayed behind. He stood at the edge of the patio, his arms crossed, watching the taillights of the county car disappear around the bend. The sun had gone down, and the courtyard was dark now except for a porch light that someone had turned on.

Inside the house, Ronan sat on the edge of the boy's bed — Emory's bed, in the boy's room at the back of the house, with the dinosaur poster on the wall and the stack of picture books on the nightstand. Emory was curled on the mattress, the red blanket tucked around him, his eyes half-closed.

"She didn't like the dark," Emory murmured. "Mama. She said the room was cold and she didn't like it. She said I shouldn't be afraid of it because she was afraid of it already and someone had to be brave."

Ronan's throat ached.

"She was brave," Ronan said. "Braveler than I ever was."

Emory looked at him with those old eyes. "You came."

A simple statement. The most important thing anyone had ever said to him.

"I came," Ronan said. "And I'm not leaving again. I'm never leaving you again, son. That's a promise."