Baz laughed. She’d missed that sound the past three years. She wouldn’t have to be without it again. But claiming that for herself was going to cost him everything he’d worked for. She didn’t doubt him when he said he was doing so willingly. But there weren’t no point pretending he’d not need to make that sacrifice now if there’d been anyone else to help her three and a half years earlier, if he’d not had his arm twisted then.

He threaded his fingers through hers. “We’ll sort it out. I know we will.”

His thoughts, she felt certain, were on their pretended deaths. She hoped the reassurance could be applied more broadly. She didn’t want him to resent her for any of this.

“Our biggest difficulty in this escape scheme is that I ain’t the one doing the resurrecting. I could manage that with hardly a thought.”

“Something your uncles know,” Baz pointed out.

That was true. “I’d have to be in the hearse with you to unbox you anyway. While wider hearses can carry two coffins, there ain’t room enough for a third person to do the resurrecting.”

“So a resurrection would be considered impossible in a hearse with two coffins abreast?” Baz asked with a pointed look.

“Not considered impossible. It is impossible. The false bottom allows for the hiding of two people. The one doing the resurrecting would either have to leave one of the bodies in its coffin and climb in the coffin ’imself or be caught out in the back of the hearse when the doors was opened.”

Baz rubbed at his mustache as he sometimes did when pondering a difficult puzzle.

They’d stumbled on something her uncles would think impossible, but only because it actually was. Unless . . .

She stood, stepping away from the table as half-formed thoughts rushed in and out of her mind.

“Gemma?” Baz’s voice only vaguely made itself known.

“Silas and Arlo know there’d have to be a third person to get two people out of two coffins in a single hearse.” The idea was so close, but her mind wouldn’t sort it out entirely. “But a third person’d be caught out. If the hearse was opened at the churchyard and only the two coffins was there with no person larking about, they’d figure the coffins weren’t emptied, leastwise not both of them.”

“And they know neither of us would leave behind the other,” Baz said.

She nodded, thinking frantically. “No third person. But without that third person, there’s no escaping.” Do something the Kincaids believe to be impossible. “There is one thing my uncles ain’t never done.” She turned and met Baz’s eye. “They ain’t never resurrected themselves.”

“Have you?”