Chapter 1

The wire bit through my coat before I understood he'd touched me.

Cole had my shoulder, and then he didn't-he had the empty air where my shoulder had been, and I had the fence. My boots slid on wet slate. I got both hands into the mesh and held.

Below us the quarry dropped away in gray steps, meltwater sheeting off the ledges into fog.

"The baby will be born without a mother," he said. Close. Quiet. Like he was reading a road sign.

The oak above the fence clicked.

Not a branch. A small, dry, mechanical click, and I knew it, because I'd heard it all winter-when the deer came through the cut, when Mamie wandered down the access road with her cane and the camera logged her like a trespasser.

Cole's hand came off me. Then the speaker.

"Let them think she tripped."

Dru's voice. Flat. No drama in it at all. Coming out of the little gray box strapped to the oak, the camera she'd bought in November and mounted herself because trespassers were getting bold.

Cole went still. Then he turned his head toward the tree, and his body followed, slow, the way a man turns toward a sound in a dark house.

I stayed braced. Right hand on the fence. Left hand moving along the bark.

I don't know how I knew where the slot was. I'd watched Dru show him the app on her phone, watched her tap the little hatch on the side. Side slot, she'd said. Takes the card.

I found the latch with my thumb and pressed. The card popped free and landed in my palm, cold and thin. I closed my fist around it and pushed it down into my coat pocket in one motion, the way I'd pocket a bill when I didn't want a customer to see.

Cole crossed to the oak. He grabbed the camera with both gloved hands and twisted it off the mount. Bark tore. He looked at it for a second, then threw it down on the slate and stomped it. Once. Twice. Plastic cracked.

He never looked at the slot.

"Wren." He turned back to me. "You're gonna say you fell."

"I didn't fall."

"You're gonna say you fell." That softness in his voice that always came before the other thing.

I didn't answer. I was counting. Nine months pregnant. No phone-mine was on the kitchen counter where I'd left it charging, and I already knew better than to ask for it back. No keys. No money. Nothing warm enough for the walk to Route 4.

But the card was in my pocket.

"Get in the truck," he said.

I got in the truck.

The ride up the access road took four minutes. Mud, then gravel, then the rutted track to the farmhouse. Cole drove one-handed and kept the other on his knee. He didn't say anything. I watched the fog go by and thought about how that camera had been pointed at the fence all week. How Dru had asked him Monday whether it was still pointing at the fence. How I'd heard her voice through the speaker once before, telling Mamie to come away from the edge, and thought it was a miracle of modern technology.

It wasn't a miracle. It was a leash.

Mamie was in her chair by the stove, robe over her flannel, the slate-headed cane across her knees. She looked up when I came in, and her milky eyes did the thing they did on her good days-they sharpened.

Cole went past us into the back hall, already on his phone. I heard him say, "Ma. It's me."

Mamie watched him go. Then she looked at me. Then at the stove. Then at me again.

She lifted the cane and tapped it on the floor. Three times. Tap. Tap. Tap.

I knelt beside her, which took a while now, and put my hand on her knee. "I know," I said.

I didn't tell her about the card. Maybe because saying it out loud would make it real, and real had weight, and I could barely stand up out of a squat.

But I reached into my pocket and touched it with my fingertips. Cold. Thin. Mine.

In the kitchen, Dru's voice came through the wall, cheerful the way she got when she'd already decided something was right.

"Feldman's office is open till six," she said. "I'll bring the papers."