“You’ll excuse us if we can’t take your word for it,” the deputy said, smirking. He walked around the end of the car, taking care to stay as far from me as I wanted to be from him, and he patted Tolliver down. I could see shiny pieces of the broken light scattered on the street.

“When can I get him out?” I asked, pretending with all my might that the deputy didn’t exist. This was sheer bullshit, but there was nothing I could do about it.

“After the judge sets the fine for the taillight, and we get this warrant thing settled,” the deputy said. “We don’t have a sitting judge here; have to wait for the judge to come around.”

I gasped. I couldn’t help it. Every fearful reaction I gave fed the deputy’s sense of power and gloating, but there was nothing I could do about it. I was on the teetering edge of panic, and I was scrabbling around in my head for some way to put this right, right now.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Bledsoe,” he answered, not too happily.

“Harper,” my brother said. He was handcuffed now, and the humming level rose higher and higher as I looked at the metal around his wrists. The deputy was looking at me uneasily. He’d quit grinning. “Just call Art. He’ll recommend someone.” Art Barfield was our lawyer. His office was in Atlanta, which was where we’d been the first time we needed an attorney.

The deputy looked even more jittery as he absorbed the implication that we had a high-powered lawyer at our backs (which wasn’t exactly true), and he began to say something. Suddenly he thought the better of it and stopped, a word half out of his mouth. Then he made up his mind again. “Don’t go crazy about this, young lady. Nothing’s going to happen to your brother in our jail.”

I hadn’t even thought about that. My focus had been on my own selfish need for Tolliver, my panic for fear of how I’d manage without him. I had been frightened of the wrong thing, I saw immediately. I realized Tolliver would be in the hands of this deputy, who was a fool with power.

Tolliver began trying to make his way around the car to me, and the deputy yanked him back by his cuffed wrists.

I had to pull myself together. I concentrated, completely, on pushing the terrified child inside me back into her hole. I breathed slowly, deeply. I had to focus on Tolliver now, not myself and my trembling hands. My brain began to function again; maybe not well, but it began to produce thoughts.