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Dutch takes his orders from Whitlock. I saw him step out of the doorway the second the man in the corner said his name. On my walk to Devil's Acre, I heard Dutch's truck crawl the road below the cedar where I was hiding.

If I tell Knox, he'll drive out to that winery today, and they'll kill him. Even if Knox lives through it, a name with no proof behind it only warns Whitlock. He'd scrub that cellar to bare stone and haul off whatever's down there before anybody with a badge got near his gate. Then it would be my word against a deacon's, and he'd know exactly who'd talked.

Keeping quiet means Knox keeps selling beef to the man who held me in his cellar, and he doesn't know it. I hate that, but I keep quiet anyway.

The greeting winds down. Daddy calls out a hymn number, gets it wrong, and has to say it again.

The woman on the piano bench is young, with her hair up in a clip, and I've never seen her before. She flips pages fast and starts "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms."

It's the hymn I hum to Sadie without meaning to. The girl plays it too fast, with her left hand dragging behind her right.

Knox laid down his terms last night, once he quit arguing with me about coming at all. We'd walk in after the sermon started, so nobody could corner me in the vestibule. He'd take the aisle seat, and his truck would sit at the curb. When either of us said go, we'd go.

I don't have to say it. I step toward the aisle, and Knox gets out of the pew ahead of me without being asked. Then he drops half a step behind my shoulder, between me and the second pew.

I walk down the center aisle in the middle of the first verse with the whole church watching me go. I don't look back at the pulpit.

The front doors are heavy oak, and I push one open myself. The bright morning sun hits me hard after the dim sanctuary.

Knox's truck sits crossways at the curb, where he left it so nobody could box us in.

He opens my door and steps back, and I climb in. Then he gets behind the wheel and starts the engine, and he doesn't put it in gear.

"What did Whitlock say to you that I didn't hear?"

"You heard all of it."

"Then what did it do to you?" His hands rest on the wheel. "You walked out of your daddy's church in the middle of a hymn. Your hands are shaking. And you looked at that man like he'd pulled a gun on you."

I shove my hands under my thighs to make them stop. "You don't like him either."

"I sell him beef for his restaurant. He pays on time." His eyes stay on the church doors. "I don't have to like him to take his money."

"That's not an answer."

His fingers drum the wheel once, hard. "No. It isn't."

He doesn't tell me why, and I don't tell him what I know. We sit in his idling truck with the engine rumbling under us and the church doors shut across the street.

He picks up his phone and thumbs a number without taking his eyes off the front steps. "Hector. Shut the main gate and stay on it. Nobody comes up my drive today but family. Not a neighbor, not a preacher, not a deacon." Hector says something I can't hear. "Anybody wants to argue, do what you have to do to stop them and then call me."

He hangs up, puts the truck in gear, and pulls out onto Main Street. He doesn't take the highway home. He turns down one caliche county road, then another. He watches his mirror the whole way.

He didn't hear what I heard in that church. All he has is a deacon's hand left hanging and the look on my face. That's enough for him to shut his gate before he knows why.

Half of Fredericksburg saw me walk into church beside Knox Hollister, and by supper the other half will hear about it. Whitlock stood an arm's length from the two of us in front of God and everybody with his hand out. A hand that was pointedly ignored. If he didn't already know where I sleep, he does now.

I spend the afternoon in the horse barn because I can't sit still anywhere else. Sadie is pulling hay out of her rack again like she's making up for lost time.

Nell came out the morning after I found Sadie. She filed the sharp hook off the mare's back tooth with a long steel rasp while Knox held Sadie's head. She took the vet wrap off my hand while she was at it, and the splits on my knuckles have scabbed over.

I scrub every water trough in the barn whether it needs it or not. My ribs ache, and I keep scrubbing. Every time I set the brush down, I hear Whitlock this morning, turning around in the second pew to tell me the Lord had brought me home. It's the same quiet voice that ordered Dutch to put me on that truck.

Knox spends the first part of the afternoon checking the fences around the main house and the barn. Through the barn door I watch him and Beckett walk the white pipe fence around the yard, rattling every gate and checking every latch. When they finish, Beckett climbs into his truck and drives down toward the main gate.

Knox comes back to the barn alone. He hangs the key to a new padlock on the nail inside the tack room door and tells me the pasture gate behind the barn is locked now.

He stays and trims hooves at the other end of the aisle. He's close enough that I always know where he is, and far enough that he isn't crowding me. He doesn't ask me about church again.