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On Tuesday she rode pressed against her door. Today she sits turned toward me with her knee against the console, close enough to touch. I keep my hand on the wheel.

Raven drives Jesse out to the ranch in her car that afternoon, so he can take his truck home.

On the way in, Beckett met them at the ranch road with the tractor, and between them they hauled my own truck home from where I left it the night of the raid. Jesse hands me my keys.

Jesse walks out to the fight barn with me while Raven goes looking for Delilah.

My older brother stands in front of those chained doors with his hands in his pockets a while.

"Bo built this place to hide what he did," Jesse says. "That ring was the closest any of us came to putting rules on what he beat into us."

"It's shut."

"You did right."

We walk back together. At the corner of the yard fence, he goes on up to the house, and I stop.

Raven and Delilah are sitting together on the guest house steps, and neither of them looks up.

"When Jesse decided I needed protecting, he hid me out at his cabin," Raven says. "I let him know exactly what I thought of that."

"Did you forgive him?"

"Eventually. Once I decided it was mine to forgive." Raven bumps Delilah's shoulder with her own. "Hollisters will lie to keep you safe. Make Knox prove he's done lying."

"He's proving it," Delilah says.

It's the first thing I've heard her say about me since Tuesday morning. I don't wait to hear more. I go to the shop for a pry bar and a come-along, the hand winch I'll need to drag those ring posts out of the ground.

At sundown I'm checking the chain on my main gate when Audrey Treadmore stops on her way out of town, with the rental packed to the windows.

"Torres offered me consulting work on the task force," she says through her window. "Finding women. Not hauling bail jumpers back to court."

"You taking it?"

"I'm taking it." She looks past me up the drive, toward the guest house. "I brought people back for years without asking why they ran. I quit that."

"She'd want to say goodbye."

"I already did. At the barn." Audrey puts the car in gear. "She told me she'd rather have had that copy of the marker from me than never seen it at all."

"She'd have been better off hearing it from me the day she came home," I tell her.

Audrey snorts. "That's the most honest thing you've said to me, Hollister."

She pulls out onto the county road and turns south toward San Antonio.

Late that night, Delilah crosses the yard to my back steps for the first time since Tuesday. She stands at the bottom of them and tells me what she wants for Sunday: my truck, a gallon of brown paint, and me on the back wall of the church, out of her way. She goes back to the guest house before I can answer.

When we pull into the church lot Sunday morning, somebody has slapped a coat of white paint over the doors, quick and thin. In the morning light every letter of JEZEBEL still shows pink underneath it, across both big oak doors.

Delilah stops at the foot of the steps and looks at them a long moment before she walks up and pulls one door open herself.

Inside, the brass plaque for Deacon Whitlock's new roof is gone from the vestibule wall. Screw holes are all that's left of it.

I take the back wall by the door and stay there. That's what she asked of me last night on my back steps. She'll do the talking. I won't move off that wall unless somebody puts a hand on her.

Elias King is in the pulpit. He sees her come down the center aisle, and his hands go flat on the wood.