McCrea watched as they gathered, his expression stern, but the anger seemed to have bled off a little. Luke slipped his hand into Victoria’s grasp, but Caleb kept his distance. If Victoria read his body language properly, he was practicing what she had always preached. In a confrontation, your opponent could only look in one direction at a time. Caleb was taking an angle on the major.

“I shot that girl,” McCrea said. “I shot Robin. Any of you think that I shouldn’t have?”

They stared back in silence.

“It’s okay if you do,” McCrea pressed. “As far as I’m concerned, there’s no right answers here. I really want your opinion. Was I wrong to shoot her? Did I murder her, as Mrs. Emerson alleges?”

Victoria held up her hand. “Okay, I misspoke. Murder was too strong a word.”

“I’m not trolling for an apology, ma’am. I don’t give a shit what you want to call anything that I do. I’m struggling to make a bigger point here. Caleb, describe what you saw when you looked in the car.”

Caleb clearly considered not answering, but when McCrea didn’t come off the point, he said, “A lot of blood.”

“What about Robin’s legs?”

Caleb blushed as his lips pressed into a thin line. Victoria knew the look. He was trying to hold back tears.

“Did you see the broken bones?” McCrea asked.

Caleb’s head twitched a yes.

“And we all saw her pain, yes? Even you heard her cries of pain, right, Luke?”

Luke squeezed his mom’s hand tighter.

“We could have helped her,” Caleb said in a tone that was barely audible.

“No!” McCrea said. “No, we couldn’t. I shot Robin because the only alternative would have been to let her suffer to death. We can’t get her out of the wreck because we don’t have the tools to do it with, and we couldn’t have treated her injuries without first removing her from the car. I did what had to be done.”

“We have morphine in our med kit,” Caleb said.

McCrea issued a bitter chuckle. “Well, I don’t know how you scored that, but good for you. Good to know. But you don’t use unique resources on lost causes.”

Victoria recoiled. “Excuse me?”

McCrea stepped closer again. “Whatever you paid for illicit narcotics, I’m confident that you didn’t shell that out with the thought of treating strangers who were going to die, anyway.”

“So you’re God now? You get to choose who lives and who dies?”

McCrea bladed his hand back toward the crushed Toyota. “That’s God’s choice, right there,” he said. “I didn’t make them run their car into a friggin’ tree. That was the hand of the Almighty, helped along, no doubt by Jack Daniel’s. Keeping them alive clearly was not part of the divine plan.”