Half the room stood—mostly men, but five or six women—and started toward the door.

“Please!” McCrea called. “This is nuts!”

“You can come along or stay, Major,” George said. “It’s your call.”

McCrea watched, slack-jawed, as Maggie’s Place emptied.

“That went well,” Victoria said in a voice dripping with irony. “I’d say this meeting is over.” She stood. “I need to organize some food preservation teams.”

“With whom?” McCrea said. “They all left.”

“Most of them will come to their senses,” Victoria said. “They always do.”

“Why didn’t you say something?” McCrea said. The question was 90 percent accusation. “They’ve made you their leader.”

“I don’t want to be their leader.”

“But you are. You know you are. You could have derailed that. It’s just more vigilante retribution.”

Victoria gave him a tired look. “Because if I’d tried to stop them, I would have failed. They’d have done it anyway, and my first act at organizing survival would have ended in failure. That would have escalated the unraveling of this community.” She leaned in close to his ear. “I’m not the one who gave them the great cause to fight for. That would be you who did that.”

“They needed to know that the woods are not safe.”

“Did they, Major? Now that they do know, are they better off or worse off?”

McCrea’s ears turned hot. He didn’t know what to say.

Victoria folded her arms. “I know that your heart holds nothing but disdain for people like me. For politicians. You’re a man of action and you think people like me get in the way and slow things down.”

“Or start wars that kill millions.” He fired those words like so many bullets.

“Don’t wallow in the gutter,” Victoria replied, ignoring his bait. If anything, her voice had grown calmer. “There are good politicians, as well as bad ones. The good ones are all about compromise. Not everyone needs to know everything all the time. You know this.”

He still didn’t have words.

“At the end of the day, these people are all going to do what they want to do,” Victoria explained. “We can try to shape their views on things, but unless our arguments prevail, we lose. I don’t mean to make you feel bad, but you just lost a lot right there. You’re the man in the uniform who doesn’t want to fight.”

“It’s a foolish fight!”

“That’s why you shouldn’t have teed it up. Do you really think I’d forgotten about that business with the truck and the driver and the Grubbs gang? Did it occur to you that my not mentioning it was an intentional act rather than just an omission?”

He thought about not answering, but then came clean. “No. It did not occur to me, even for an instant.”