At Anne’s insistence, they had scheduled the meeting in a conference room down the hall from the ICU. She had spent the night in her clothes, on the bed with Haley Fordham clinging to her, alternately sleeping then waking up to the little girl’s cries and whimpers.

Vince had spent the night in the chair in the corner of the room. She felt guilty for that. He should have been home, in bed, sleeping off his headache.

She worried about him. The doctors didn’t have any idea what the long-term effects might be to having a bullet fragmented inside one’s head. When the pain came on him suddenly, it always made Anne afraid that some piece of shrapnel was moving inside his brain, doing damage.

He had finally gone home to shower and change around six fifteen and had returned with a change of clothes for her.

He wasn’t happy about the decision she had made, but she hadn’t seen any alternative. Haley Fordham had likely watched her mother die, had probably witnessed her murder. She had been choked unconscious and left lying against her mother’s bloody corpse, left for dead for—what?—two days, Vince had thought.

Trauma didn’t begin to describe what this four-year-old child had been through. What she needed now was stability and consistency, and someone who had at least some training in how to help her through the aftermath of her ordeal.

Anne knew she fit the bill in a way no one else would be able to. She had been a victim of a violent crime herself. She knew the kind of fear Haley must have known and would continue to experience.

Haley was asleep and quiet when Anne finally left the room for the meeting. On her way out of the unit she told one of the nurses, “If you need me, come get me.”

Knowing what was waiting for her in that conference room, she half hoped for the interruption. This wasn’t going to be easy or pleasant, and she wasn’t going to have the patience for it.

One of the aftereffects of her ordeal was an extreme intolerance of people’s bullshit. Life was too precious to waste time pretending to be diplomatic in the face of overinflated egos.

Anne was the last to arrive to the meeting. On one side of the conference table were Vince and Cal Dixon, who had come to represent the interests of the sheriff’s office and the investigation.

On the other side of the table, wearing her perpetual sour expression, sat Maureen Upchurch from Child Protective Services, a woman built like the corner mailbox. A bad home permanent made her look as if she were wearing a wig made out of an apricot poodle.