Chapter 1

The pantry door slammed shut on my right hand.

Pain went white behind my eyes. I heard the bones in my knuckles grind against the steel frame before my brain caught up. The door bounced off my fingers, and Kyle shoved it again, harder, until the latch clicked.

My knees hit the concrete. My pregnant belly pressed against the wood, and the cold from the floor bled through my flannel and into my bones.

Through the gap under the door, I saw his boots. Polished. Black. He’d worn them to the church council meeting that got canceled because of the storm.

“No one’s going to hear you over this,” he said.

His voice was calm. Pastor voice. The one he used for funerals and potlucks.

I yanked my hand free. Skin tore. Blood welled across my knuckles and dripped onto the floor, bright against the gray concrete.

The door opened. Kyle stepped inside the pantry like he owned it, because he did. Everything in Barlow’s Reach belonged to him, or so he believed. The church. The parsonage. His brother’s land. Me.

He held the green ledger open in one hand. The other hand held his silver lighter.

“You went through my things,” he said.

“That’s the pantry ledger.”

“It’s mine.”

“It’s the church’s.”

He smiled. That pulpit smile. “Everything’s mine, Hannah. You know that.”

I looked at the page he had open. Columns of numbers. Missing deliveries. Fake invoices. And at the bottom, in my husband’s neat handwriting, a running list of payments to someone named V. Cutler.

My name was on a loan application tucked between the pages. Forged. I’d never signed it.

“Where’s the carbon copy?” I whispered.

He clicked the lighter. The flame leaned toward the paper.

“Kyle. Don’t.”

“You think anyone will believe you? The pregnant wife who can’t keep the pantry shelves stocked? The woman who let his disabled brother get so thin the state came asking questions?”

I had nothing. No car. No money. No phone signal in this storm. My sister lived two hours away, and I hadn’t talked to her in a year because Kyle said she was poison.

But I had my boot.

I kicked the case of canned peaches at the bottom of the shelf. The case jolted into the shelf leg. The ledger slipped from Kyle’s hand. The carbon copy-the flimsy pink sheets underneath-slid out and skated across the concrete, under the bottom shelf, into the dark.

Kyle’s eyes dropped. “You little-”

A beep cut through the wall. Short. Urgent. Then another.

Eli’s feeding-tube alarm.

Kyle’s jaw tightened. He glanced at the north wall, where his brother slept in a bed he hadn’t left in years, hooked to a machine that did the eating for him.

“Hannah.” His voice dropped. “Don’t.”

My left hand found the old bell rope hanging through the open closet door beside me. I’d dusted that rope a hundred times. I’d never pulled it.

I pulled it.

Above us, the church bell swung. One strike. Two. The sound rolled through the sanctuary and out into the blizzard. Dust sifted from the ceiling joists and landed on my sleeves.

Kyle’s face changed. The calm cracked. He spun toward the stair, lighter still lit, ledger still in his fist. The door hung open behind him. He left it unlatched for exactly half a second.

I dropped flat and reached under the shelf. My fingers closed on the carbon copy just as Kyle’s footsteps pounded up the stairs.

I didn’t stop to breathe. I crawled through the pantry, through the narrow hall, into the parsonage kitchen. The stove was already glowing orange. Kyle had left the oven door open. He was feeding the original ledger to the flames, page by page.

He didn’t see me. He was too busy watching his lies burn.

I went the other way. Through the dining room. Past the framed picture of his father, the man who’d left the family land to Eli in trust, with Kyle as trustee. Past the silver watch on the sideboard that Kyle claimed was a donation but I knew came from the estate.

Eli’s room was warm. The feeding pump beeped again, softer now. He was awake. His eyes tracked me from the bed, wide and frightened.

“It’s me,” I whispered. “It’s Hannah.”

He blinked once. Yes.

His wheelchair sat in the corner. I lifted the battery pack and slid the carbon copy underneath, between the casing and the frame. It wasn’t much. But it was proof.

Kyle’s voice carried from the kitchen. He was on the phone.

“Yes, tonight. She’s unstable. She left the pantry door open. She let Eli’s trays go untouched. I’m worried about the baby.”

My blood ran cold.

“Eight forty-five? Thank you. I’ll keep her here until you arrive.”

He hung up. I heard him walk toward Eli’s room. I pressed my back against the wall and tried to breathe.

The social worker was coming. In two hours, a stranger would walk through that door and decide whether I was fit to keep my child.

I looked at Eli. He blinked once, slow. A question.

I put my hand on his. “We’re going to be okay.”

I didn’t know if I believed it. But I had the carbon copy. And somewhere in this house, Eli had a tablet that could talk.

I just had to get to it before Kyle did.