“Well… I’m afraid I have some sad news. Are you in a place where you can talk?”

Through the silence, the sheriff sped north along the highway, waiting for a cue to continue. The sunset was complete. The sky had transitioned to an exhausted black-and-blue. The roads, fields, and forests breathed back their accumulated heat, making the night air so heavy that she could feel the Charger straining against it.

“He was a good boy…”

Daniel Greevey’s mom made it only that far before she crumpled.

“And we… did everything we knew… how to do. No matter what…”

The sheriff said, “I’m so sorry.”

She waited with the details while the grieving mother wept.

“No matter what,” Colleen Greevey managed at last, “he’ll always be my little boy. He will always be my baby.”

At home, the sheriff’s husband had pulled their plastic kiddie pool into the center of the front yard and filled it with water from the hose and what appeared to be all the block ice from the chest freezer.

She stopped at the spilling rim of the pool. Harley’s dirt-stained Rattlers uniform had been shucked on the grass. He and Dylan sat in the pool dumping cups of cool water over each other.

“Mommy! Look! Me and Daddy are skinny-dipping!”

Harley had fastened a bread sack around Dylan’s arm to keep his stitches dry. The brother who had chopped his arm with a hoe was nowhere to be seen, but light shone from the boys’ upstairs bedroom.

“That must feel good.”

“Daddy said you and him used to skinny-dip.”

“Did he say that?”

“Daddy said you guys—”

But Dylan fell silent when he saw her looking up where Taylor was. Nightjars whizzed above the roof. The sky had darkened enough for a few stars to prick through. A lone coyote howled.

Harley said, “Come join us.”

“I think I’ll take a shower.”

She went inside, wrenched off her duty boots, peeled off her uniform shirt and her vest, and climbed the stairs in her sweat-sticky sports bra.

“Mommy’s home.”

She tapped on the door. When she opened it, Taylor glowered up from a scene he had constructed with Legos and action figures on the bedroom floor. Her already heavy heart sank deeper. He was supposed to be composing two simple apologies. This was the consequence she had designed. But pen and paper sat untouched on his dresser. Between his widespread legs on the floor, a Lego figure stood at the side of a Lego road, a Lego truck approaching.

“Sweetie, how’s it going? Did you already—”

He jumped up and bulldozed the door into her, pushed her back until the latch clicked shut.