“What do you propose we do about all of this?” That question, just as mild, was addressed to me.

“Nothing,” I told her. “This is Greer’s problem, not yours. Let her deal with it.”

“It’s not that I don’t want a little brother,” Sadie-Grace blurted out, one of her feet starting to beat back and forth around her other ankle. “I do. I really, really do. I just want Greer to tell Daddy that the baby’s adopted, because if she doesn’t, I might have to, and if I’m the one who tells him, he might not ever forgive me, and he might not ever forgive her, and, worse, he might not go through with the adoption at all.”

It’s not an adoption, I thought. Adoptions—legal ones—went through the state. Adoptions didn’t inspire the parties peripherally involved to press a shotgun into the small of a potential witness’s back.

“It’s illegal for Greer to pay Beth for her baby,” I said, knowing the risk as I said it. “Paying you on a purportedly unrelated matter is more of a gray area.” I let that sink in. “Does Beth even want to give up her baby?”

I counted the silence that followed that question with the

beats of my heart. One. Two. Three. I made it to six before I got my answer, in equal parts because my heart was racing and because the woman across from me knew how to use silence as a weapon.

“Of course she does. You think living in a place like Two Arrows makes us monsters? Hell, girlie, I birthed six babies of my own and would give my life for every one. Beth’s one of my grandbabies. I’d put all three of you and that hoity-toity bitch inside in shallow graves before I’d let anyone force a decision like this on one of mine.”

The woman was, in her own way, as good at guilt-tripping as Lillian was.

“I’m sorry,” I said. Two Arrows felt different than the town I’d grown up in, but I was betting the unspoken code of honor was the same. If you insulted someone, you apologized, unless you wanted them to make you apologize.

“Seems to me,” I continued, “that all of us can get what we want here. You can get your money—Beth’s money,” I corrected myself, “from Greer. Beth can give her baby to people—including a big sister with not a lot of common sense but an absolutely oversize heart—who will love the tar out of him, and we can all make Greer tell Sadie-Grace’s dad the truth.”

“What kind of man could find out his wife had faked an entire pregnancy and just proceed on with an adoption?” one of the women asked.

“The thing about my daddy,” Sadie-Grace said, “is that he really loves beetles.”