Chapter 2

Sunday morning I woke up in the same clothes and the same wet shoes, and my hip had locked.

I got the leggings off in the bathroom. A bruise the size of a dinner plate, purple going yellow at the edge, across the top of my right thigh. The baby kicked all through it, steady and annoyed.

No phone. Rennie had killed it, and the landline had been shut off in September to save twenty-two dollars a month. I got a coat.

Trent was at the kitchen table with coffee, staring at nothing.

"Where are you going?"

"Charlene's."

"Why."

I didn't answer. It's the one thing I've always been good at, not answering, and it costs me every time, and I keep paying.

Eight blocks in a fine gray rain. Charlene Nunn's house smells like wet dog and coffee and the cinnamon wax melts she buys at the outlet. She's been league secretary since 1994. She keeps the roster in a three-ring binder and she keeps everybody's business in her head and she is the closest thing to kin I've got in Cedar Hollow.

She took one look at me on her porch and pulled me inside by the sleeve.

"Sweetheart. Your face."

"Is it still up?"

"What?"

"The livestream. From last night. Is it still up."

She sat me at her kitchen table with a cup of coffee I couldn't drink and opened her tablet, and there it was on the Mabry Lanes page. Two hours and thirty-nine minutes. One continuous take.

Ninety-four live viewers at the peak. Four hundred and eleven comments.

Charlene had downloaded the feed at 9:40 while it was still running and reposted it in the league's private group at 10:15, because she's been running that group for nineteen years and she doesn't trust anything she can't keep a copy of.

"You're the only admin," she said. "Rennie can't touch it. She's been asking me to post the tournament bracket for a year and I told her, honey, I don't have the password, I'm not the one."

"I know."

"Della. What happened in that room."

I told her the short version. She listened with her hands flat on the table like she was holding the wood down.

Then she scrubbed the bar to 9:12 and hit play.

The party room is empty. One tube flickering. The long tables set with paper tablecloths for a trophy night that's already over, red cups standing around, the cake box open on the end. Rain on the roof sounds like static on the recording.

At 9:12 and eleven seconds, Rennie Mabry comes through the doorway backward, dragging the gray mat by one corner.

She lays it in the doorway. She kneels down and flattens it with both hands, rubber side down, smooth gray side up. She stands back and looks at it the way you'd look at a car you were thinking about buying.

Then she walks to the middle of the room and stands there with her arms crossed, and her sister's-in-law empty room, and she says:

"She came at me first. She came at me first, and I put my hands up. I put my hands up and she kept coming."

She says it four times. Different rhythms. Once with a little catch in her throat. Once flat. Once with her hand out like she was stopping traffic.

On the fifth one she gets it right.

I watched my sister-in-law rehearse her lie in a room she thought was empty, and my coffee went cold in my hands, and the baby turned over and pushed a foot up under my ribs so hard I made a noise.

Charlene paused it on Rennie's face, lipstick perfect, eyes bright, mouth shaped around the word first.

"That's my mat," I said.

"Della."

"That's the mat from the closet. She put it there at a quarter after nine. I tripped on it at twenty-five of ten."

Charlene took the tablet back and kept her hand on it, like she was afraid I'd throw it.

"Honey," she said. "Keep watching. There's more of your husband on here than there is of her."