Chapter 7

Two weeks, and Odelle's warning hadn't turned into anything Sable could hold in her hand.

No broken window. No note under the door. Just the feeling of being counted in a town too small to lose anyone in.

She found out what the warning had been saving itself for on a gray Thursday, in the gravel lot behind the county building.

Odelle was leaning against a dented sedan. No orange polo now, no apron, just a windbreaker zipped to the chin. Paid leave had taken the uniform and left the eyes.

"Got a minute," Odelle said. It wasn't a question.

Sable stopped with her keys in her fist. Cinder waited in the cab of the truck Cormac had left her the keys to, nose against the glass.

"I've got an appointment."

"This won't take yours." Odelle pushed off the car. "I've been thinking about that watch. How memory plays tricks. I could call your Ms. Ruiz and tell her I got it wrong. That I found it after, behind the register, and I panicked and blamed the new girl." She said it smooth, like she'd practiced it in a mirror. "Complaint goes away. No record. You walk clean."

"And?"

"And you quit. For real this time. And you're out of this county by Saturday." The smile didn't reach anything. "You take your dog and your tin and your little story and you start it somewhere else."

Sable understood the whole shape of it then. This wasn't mercy. Odelle was running ahead of an audit and a swab that hadn't landed yet, and she wanted the one person who could set the clock against her gone before either could speak.

"You're scared," Sable said. Not cruel. Just true.

"I'm being generous." Odelle's chin came up. "Nobody's ever generous with you twice."

Sable thought of Friday rents and rooms with the furniture that came with them, and all the years she'd made herself small to keep a door from swinging shut.

"I'm done leaving," she said. "I left once when I was three, and I don't even remember choosing it. I'm not doing it again on your say-so."

She got in the truck. Cinder put her head on Sable's knee.

In the mirror, Odelle got smaller and did not wave.

The collection site was a storefront between a tax office and a vacant nail salon. Cormac was already there, hat in his hands, standing like a man who'd learned not to sit in waiting rooms. A woman in scrubs had a clipboard and a kit still sealed in plastic.

They checked Sable's ID against the form and wrote the number down. They swabbed the inside of her cheek, both sides, and sealed the swab in a tube marked with the same number. Then they slid a release across the counter.

Her name on one line. Cormac's on another. A box that said she understood the result would be shared with the parties and could be used in court.

Sable read it twice.

A negative meant no father, no name, no story to set against Odelle's - just a fired waitress who'd made a rich man feel sorry for her. Everything she'd pushed against for a month could turn, in three weeks, into nothing she could keep.

Cormac watched her. He didn't tell her it would be fine. He'd quit lying to her early, and she'd remember that.

She signed with a shaking hand, and watched the tube drop into the courier box.