He made her feel safe. That was how she’d come to be his, after everything. She always wanted him around. When he was there, she forgot, first for minutes, then hours, then whole days, and now sometimes for weeks, that her mother saw the world more clearly than she did.

He told her that she was safe and her children were protected with his presence, his actions, his words. That might be the thing she loved about him most of all.

He was lying, of course. The world was dangerous and broken. But people had to feel safe anyway, to get on with the business of living.

She would never truly forget, though. She was changed. She was neither the girl he’d grown up with nor the woman he’d fallen for. No one could go through what she had gone through and come out the same.

But she was still Bree, and Bree, to him, was breathing. He would kill for her. He would die for any of these children. So. Here they were.

She turned back to check on Robbie. Her mother was trying to open the water bottle for him, and he was holding it away from her, saying, “I do it myseff!” That was his second-favorite thing to say, right after no. In the dappled shade of the porch, his face so set and willful, it was like they were staring at a tiny Trey.

Bree squeezed his hand, and when he turned to smile at her, he saw that the hollow sorrow had deepened.

“Sometimes I think he was a lamb,” Bree said. He knew from the tone exactly who she meant.

“A lamb?” he said. It was not how he remembered Trey.

“He did it, you know,” she said. “He raped her.”

They talked about Trey every day. There were pictures of Trey and Betsy all over the house. So yeah. They talked about him.

They didn’t talk about this. They had never talked about this. Even when he came to the hospital to sit with her while Trey was in the six-hour surgery that he would not survive. Even when she slipped him the envelope with all the other photos she’d apparently stolen from the crime scene before getting on the ambulance with her husband.

Which, damn. That was some Betsy-level boldness. Some folks might even find that cold. But Marshall? He’d admired it. She was a mother, bone deep. Her girls and her son would never stumble across the picture of their father raping Lexie Pine up on the Internet. Lexie herself had been past needing the acknowledgment. In another hour the doctor would come out and tell them Trey was past being able to give it. The whole story had not even come out. The Cabbats had a part in that, he thought, the way the news stories had all died quick and local.