“There’s nothing.” He shakes his head no. “What all did they say about me?”

“They showed a little bit of that video from you in the church—the part that makes you look the worst.”

He nods, but she isn’t looking at him.

He puts his hand atop hers to see if she will let it stay. “Please, believe me,” he says.

She eases her hand away and there is no tenderness or malice in her voice. “What’re you going to do?”

“I’ve got to take him back.”

She shakes her head, her eyes on the ground. “Just lay low for a little bit,” she says. Her voice comes from the back of her throat. “Let this pass.”

“I can’t raise him on the run,” he says, as if she needs convincing. He has had this conversation with himself so many times before, but never anyone else. “When I took him, I just thought, ‘I can’t be away from my boy. I can’t stand it.’ I should have listened to my lawyer. She said we could appeal. But I couldn’t stand the thought of a whole year without being with him properly.” Now he is just talking out loud. “When I take him back, they’ll put me away. I’ll never get to see him.”

Help me, he thinks.

Evona puts her hand on his back with some amount of hesitation, then moves her palm around in a circle. His mother had done this, long long ago, when he was little and sick. He had always been her pick. She had always been affectionate with him in a way she had never shown Luke, but he had resented her for it instead of relishing it. He recalled one time when she had touched him in this comforting way. He had been on the bathroom floor, his head against the cool porcelain of the toilet after vomiting with a stomach virus, and she had folded herself down in the little space beside him, rubbing his back. Bless your heart, honey, she’d said in a soft voice. He had forgotten that voice until just now because that was before she became so terrible. When someone turns mean, do we lose all that good that was in them, just as they do? He thinks that maybe we do, although we hold on to it as long as we can, hoping.

“I sure don’t want y’all to go,” Evona says. “I kind of like having you two around.” She takes her hand away from his back, folds it atop her other one on her lap. “But her face, Asher. You’ve got to make this right.”

Far out over the ocean there is the rumbling of thunder and seconds later lightning illuminates the night.