It wasn’t just the bullet passing by Patton’s left ear that concerned her. After all, she had sustained gunfire before, even been hit once—if you could call a graze on the forearm that barely left a scar a hit. No, what worried Patton was the sound this bullet made, or rather the sound this bullet didn’t make. Every bullet that had ever traveled near her had brought with it the distinctive crack of an object in supersonic motion. But this bullet merely hissed quietly as it crossed the kitchen before embedding itself in her refrigerator. This bullet was subsonic. This bullet didn’t come from a confused deer hunter or some nut whose idea of target practice was taking potshots at her fence posts. Such things did happen at the lonely end of Lone Pine Road just outside the town of Alta Vista. In her experience though, only one type of marksman went to the trouble of ensuring his rounds were subsonic and therefore nearly silent. This bullet had been fired by a professional assassin, and he was not likely to miss twice. Patton thought all this in the split second it took her to drop to the floor behind the kitchen island. The second round exploded the bag of flour on the counter, filling the air with white dust. The perfect cover, she thought.

Most women who suddenly came under fire in the middle of a Sunday morning bake would be terrified or panicked or at the very least shocked. A woman like Patton Harcourt, with her particular history, might also be laid low by anxiety or even kicked in the gut by a flashback. But Patton felt none of these things. Patton felt pissed. She had been making chocolate ganache–filled profiteroles like the ones she had seen on The Great British Baking Show last week, and if they turned out, she planned to take a batch to Jasper. Now she lay on the floor listening to the mixer overbeating her choux pastry and thinking of the ruined profiteroles and of Jasper waiting for her visit while she spent her day dealing with a fucking sniper.

She flipped onto her back for a moment, looking at the way the midmorning sun flickered through the cloud of flour. Even though it reminded her of the sunlight filtering through the dust on that day ten years ago, she felt no panic, no anxiety, only cool under fire as another round hit the fridge, no doubt burying itself in the leftover meatloaf. That was no great loss, but she had just spent twelve hundred dollars on the fridge, and she doubted that the warranty covered gunshot wounds.