When I left that ICU room, I had for the first time some small inkling of the guilt my father must feel over Caitlin’s death. When I could stand the guilt no longer, I allowed a different feeling to rise and take its place. Dread. Dread, and pity for the people who committed that outrage upon Keisha Harvin. Standing joined in that prayer circle, my hands dwarfed by those of the Harvin brothers, I felt immeasurable fury seething within both men. No power on earth is going to stop Aaron and Roosevelt from making someone wish they had never taken it into their fevered brains to attack a vulnerable young woman trying to make her way in the world. Whether it’s the Knox clan or some faction of the VK motorcycle club, they should consider themselves beneficiaries of divine deliverance if they live to be arrested by the FBI.

When I got home from the hospital, I called Peter Smith and told him he could give Serenity Butler my cell number. After reading her memoir, I realized I had been an ass not to read it on the day I received it. I told Peter that Serenity could call me whenever she arrived, and we’d have coffee waiting for her at my house. Peter told me that would probably be after five, and he would update me if he learned anything more specific.

Mia and Annie overheard this call, and I thought nothing of it until Mia began to question me while Annie watched a DVD of Grey’s Anatomy in the library.

“What’s the story on Serenity Butler?” Mia asked, tapping away at her MacBook. “Google says she won the National Book Award last November.”

“She did. For a memoir.”

“Ever met her?”

“Nope.”

“She’s pretty.” Mia rotated her computer so that I could see a shot of Serenity standing in front of a huge pine tree. “Like model pretty.”

“I know. But in the book she explains how that’s been more of a liability to her than an asset. In the army, and also when she was a little girl. It drew too much attention to her.”

“This woman was in the army?”

“I know. It seems weird, doesn’t it? She grew up dirt poor outside Laurel, Mississippi. Never knew her father. Her uncles were in the pulpwood business, which is a damn tough life. She enlisted to get money for college. She was in when the first Gulf War broke out. Served in both Kuwait and Iraq during Desert Storm. She saw a lot of stuff.”

“Wow.” For once, Mia looks impressed.

“The book is structured around her search for her father in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was a white man.”

“Obviously. Her mother never told her who her father was?”

“Her mother died in childbirth.”

“Man. She’s, like, out of Dickens or something.”