They flew toward the closed front gate, then crashed through the gate, and then they were on the road and skidding sideways as Anne wrestled the wheel.

She drove as if Crane was flying behind them, a demon from hell bent on snatching them back into the darkness. She didn’t know exactly where they were. She pointed the car toward the glow of light that had to be town and didn’t slow down and didn’t look back.

Chapter 92

92

Neither of them spoke as Anne drove. She glanced over at Tommy several times, wondering when the enormity of what he had gone through would hit him. Was it now? Was he seeing his father in his mind’s eye, or the monster he had saved her from? Would he ever have to realize what his father might have done to him? Would his mind ever be able to make sense of any of it?

How could it? Why would it? He was a little boy who loved his dad like he was a god. What would be the point of him understanding it now or ever?

Anne didn’t think about how she would handle it. She thought only about getting to the sheriff’s office on the last little drop of adrenaline trickling through her veins. She was beginning to feel her physical injuries in a serious way. All other injury would have to wait its turn.

She pulled the car into the parking lot—not up to the doors of the building. Once they went inside, everything would change. She wanted this one moment alone with Tommy.

She got out of the car and went around to the other side to take Tommy’s hand—the same way she had the day he and the other kids had found the body, and she had taken him home to face his mother.

She knelt down and looked at his face, his eyes, trying to read him, feeling that in the snap of a moment his soul had aged a thousand years. Her heart ached for him and for herself as if God had taken it from her chest and wrung it out like a sponge.

“You are so precious,” she whispered, tears filling every part of her. “And this is going to be so hard. I wish I could change it for you, Tommy.”

“I’ll be all right,” he said, as if to reassure her.

Anne nodded, knowing that he wouldn’t be. He wouldn’t be all right. And there was nothing she could do about it.

She touched his cheek like touching an angel. “You’re my hero, you know,” she said, tears falling.

Anne gathered him to her and held him tight, and he held her back. Then they both dried their eyes, and she held his hand, and they went up the sidewalk together.

And when they walked through the doors, everything changed.