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I’ve been waiting for him to say my name. No way I’m not being involved in this. Even if he told me to stand down, I wouldn’t.

“You should see about organizin’ a watch,” Steel tells me. “If Julia will agree to it. If not, do it anyway, just be more discreet about it. She tells you anythin’ else you might think is useful, you let me know.”

I thump my fist into my hand, cracking my knuckles. “You got it, Prez.”

“One more thing. All of you, wait until tomorrow. It’s gettin’ late. Don’t want to upset the neighborhood by prowlin’ around at night.” Steel stands, which means church is over. The others start to disperse, talking to each other as they go. Brick’s pulling Pops aside, must be asking him to be his partner tomorrow for the neighborhood search.

Pops is a good choice, I note. He’s over sixty now, with gray-white hair and a long beard. He’s got this way with him. Maybe the beard gives him a fucking Santa vibe—or it could be the belly. Whatever it is, people open up around him. The neighbors might be more likely to talk to him if Brick is smart enough to stay back and let Pops do his thing.

I stay at the table, tense, teeth gritted. I’m not waiting for tomorrow to start working on this. I need to make a list of the people I think would be willing to watch Ruby’s house. I’m going to be there as much as I can, but I won’t be able to be there all the time, which is when the watch will be necessary. Then once I’ve got my list, I need to actually contact everyone to make sure they’re in. I’ll have to work around their schedules. It’s going to take a lot of coordination.

It will be worth it. We’re going to get some answers. We’re going to keep them safe.

Chapter 12

Julia

Ikeep going to look at my car to check if it’s been vandalized again. I barely believe what the club was able to do yesterday. They fixed all the damage and even went out of their way to clean it. They didn’t have to do that. They didn’t have to do anything, and they did everything.

“Julia?” Mom stands on the front porch, hands on her hips, apron tied around her middle. “I thought you were helping me with dinner.”

“I am.” I take a last look at my gleaming, flawless car and go back inside. The fragrant scents of tomatoes and ground meat lure me into the kitchen where we were working to make pasta from scratch before I snuck away. Mom got out fresh produce to make up a salad before abandoning it all on the porch to go find me.

While she goes to the stove to watch the sauce, I take over salad duty, placing a head of lettuce on a cutting board. The dull knife struggles to bite through the crisp layers. Add a knife sharpener to the never-ending list of things to pick up from the store.

“I was thinking,” I begin, “that I want to thank everyone for all the work they did. There’s a lot of them, especially if you add in their wives and girlfriends. I want to make cookies, but also some cupcakes or something. What do you think?”

“I’m sure they would all appreciate that.” Mom turns back to look at me as I slide chopped lettuce from the cutting board into a large bowl. “Are you going to do anything special for Wolf?”

“I’m sure he’ll get some of the cookies,” I murmur.

“But nothing that’s specifically only for him?” Mom makes a soft tutting sound. “He’s the only reason that all those people came to help us. He didn’t have to do that, but he did. He really cares for you.”

She’s not going to be deflected, showing me again how she’s changed in such a short period of time. I focus on the carrots I’m chopping. “I just go back and forth on how much I can trust him. The way that things happened between us, I get doubts.”

“You’re different now. Maybe he’s different, too.”

“Mom…” I give up on the carrots. I was doing a bad job anyway. “I can’t ignore the fact he was arrested for having drugs on him. I don’t mean just marijuana.”

She’s silent.

I continue, “I saw his record, his mugshot, everything. Even if it seems like he cares about me, about us, that’s evidence to me that there’s parts of him I don’t know about. Maybe I don’t want those parts around me or my son.”

“Did you talk with him about what happened?” Mom stirs the pasta sauce again, then begins to boil a pot of water for the noodles. “Prison isn’t just about punishment these days. There’s all sorts of rehabilitation programs. He’s rough around the edges, but there’s no knowing how he’s changed or grown unless you give him a chance.”

“It’s a lot of back-and-forth. It’s tiring. It’s too much on top of everything else I’m dealing with.” My shoulders slump. I try not to pay too much attention to how tired I am. As soon as I let my guard down and acknowledge it, the exhaustion springs forward like a monster to drag me into the black depths of fatigue.

“He’s not the only one keeping secrets though, is he?”

My hand clenches tight around the handle of the knife. That was what Wolf said before too, that I hadn’t told him I’d had a child. So I tell her the same thing I told him. “It’s not the same.”

“Not the same secret, no. But the same in terms of impact.” Mom pauses. “I think that what you’re keeping from him is even more significant, in fact.”

I jerk my head up, breaths rattling in my throat. The look she gives me is filled with knowledge that she shouldn’t have. I never told her how I became pregnant and I always figured she would never guess because of how lost she was.

But now I remember when she first came in with Artie, after the hair salon, and saw Wolf in her house. She had been looking hard, staring. Noticing. Absorbing the similar hair and facial features.

Even if she hadn’t figured it out right then, it had stuck with her enough to have her put the pieces together at some point.