He thought he owed Mack everything, owed his elder what the world couldn’t and wouldn’t give him for most of his life: protection. But what did he owe Breanna McMillan, a girl who had ignored history and gotten in bed with the enemy? “They just talk like that, not all of ’em really hate black people. It’s like any other gang. They just showing out, you know.”

“They kill people, Breanna,” Darren said.

“Not Ronnie.” She said it with a note of tenderness that made Darren want to vomit. He was done. He was getting the hell out of this mess he’d made, getting the hell out of Dodge. He heard Mack calling his name from the porch as he walked to his truck. But he didn’t look back; he might not ever look back.

He drove to the house in Camilla in a blind rage.

He saw Clayton had called twice since he’d left Mack’s place, and he could only imagine that perhaps word was spreading—among the family, at least—that Mack’s girl was in trouble. But he turned his back on all of it, felt a hole in his chest where his heart ought to be when it came to saving Breanna from a plight that was so different from the one he’d imagined Mack had been in this whole time. Mack had been a victim; Breanna was a child divorced from history and therefore lost. Actually, she was nineteen, he remembered, hardly a child, so there was no excuse for the choices she’d made. He was too angry to feel sorry for her. And if finding out that Breanna was the killer had with lightning speed changed the way he felt about the righteousness of the crime, had he ever really been right about any of it? Was he right to have gotten a false confession from Bill King to save a nineteen-year-old girl from a twisted relationship she chose with Ronnie Malvo?

He walked into the house in Camilla carrying a bottle of Jim Beam he’d picked up at Frank’s Liquor on Route 150 in Coldspring and set the first record he could find on the turntable of his uncles’ hi-fi, felt fate’s hand when Little Milton’s “I Can’t Quit You, Baby” came through the speakers a few seconds later.