Marshall called around two. Just to check on me, he said. I’d been texting with Trey on and off, but I hadn’t told my husband I was hanging around outside the school like a sex offender. I told Marshall, though.

“When I try to leave, or even look away from the building, I panic. It’s ridiculous. There’s an armed ex-marine in the car behind me who’ll be here all day. But apparently I think it’s my magic presence that keeps them safe.”

Mills sat beside me, stoic, trying to pretend he wasn’t listening.

“So don’t drive them tomorrow,” Marshall said. “Let Trey handle it.”

It was simple and pragmatic, and it worked. Tuesday I kissed them good-bye and let them go on to the school with their father and Maxwell. Mills stayed with me.

After that I couldn’t leave the house. Panic trilled up my spine at the very idea of stepping outside, being visible and exposed. I wanted walls around me and my son. I wanted more ex-soldiers, dotted around my yard like points on a compass.

I called the school office to make sure the girls had been checked in to the system at homeroom. I couldn’t let Robert out of my sight. I liked him best bound to me in his sling. I tried not to think about how Coral’s body had so recently been in place of mine, how my son had been tied to her, his flutter-fast heart beating beside hers.

The only thing that got me out the door was the arrival of the mail around eleven. I left Robert asleep in a bouncy chair by Mills and went to get it. I wanted to be the one to intercept Coral’s letter. By then I wasn’t waiting for it so much as I was resigned to it.

It wasn’t there, though. Not yet. Just a stack of junk.

I closed the mailbox, impatience and relief at war in me, and my cell phone rang. I juggled the pile of mail into one arm, then pulled it out of my back jeans pocket. It was Marshall.

He was mostly checking up on me, but he also had updates he’d gleaned from his sources about the ongoing investigation. Coral hadn’t used the detonator she’d had hidden under her afghan. That had been her backup. The explosion had been caused by a chemical timer.

“I told you she wasn’t bluffing,” I said, sitting down on one of the wrought-iron chairs on my front porch. “At the end she kept saying I was out of time, that it was too late to call Trey up. I didn’t understand.”