Page 138 of The Final Cut

“No.” I do not look at him this time. “She answers.”

The woman looks at the cross at the front of the chapel, and for a moment I think she is going to pray instead. I might actually set the room on fire if she does.

Then she turns back.

“With Isabel,” she says.

The name drops between us like a blade. My body goes numb and cold.

“What?”

“She made me come with her.”

The words are careful. Too careful. There is a whole locked room behind them, and I can hear things moving inside.

“She took Delia,” I say.

“Yes.”

“And you?”

Her eyes shine. “Yes.”

I step back again. The pew catches me. “And you let Cal raise me.”

Pain crosses her face so fast it takes on physical presence. “I begged him to.”

My mother looks at Deacon again, and whatever she sees in his face makes her stop talking. Good. Maybe he can be useful in this wreckage he helped keep hidden.

Deacon’s voice is low when he speaks. “This room is not safe for the whole truth.”

I laugh. “That’s your concern right now?”

“Yes.”

The answer is immediate enough to cut through me.

He looks at the chapel door, then at the hallway beyond it. “You came here off pattern. We came through service routes, but Isabel already proved she can reach phones she shouldn’t be able to reach and people she shouldn’t own. If she knows about this meeting, she’ll use it before we make it back.”

My mother stiffens, which is enough to tell me something else. She is afraid of Isabel too.

“I am not leaving with her,” I say, indicating the woman standing in front of me.

“No one asked you to,” Deacon answers.

My mother flinches. Tiny. Controlled.

I look at her again, and the anger shifts under my feet, hitting some new unstable place. She looks older than she should. Too thin. Eyes like mine, yes, but exhausted in a way makeup cannot fix. She does not look like a woman who has been free. She does not look like a woman who walked out of my childhood and decided not to come back because she found something easier.

That would be simpler.

I need simple, and I’m getting anything but.

Cal is in a room down the hall with tubes in his throat because Isabel sent a bullet and he stepped between me and it. My sister is in a hotel with bandaged wrists and knees because Isabel put her on a chapel floor. Sabine is dead on stone stairs because she opened a door. Deacon is standing in front of me, keeper of other people’s truths and lies.

And my mother is alive.

The thought comes again, impossible.