“I’ll turn myself in,” Cal said. “Right now. If that’s what you want.”

“That’s not what I want,” I told him.

“Okay,” he said, nodding. “Okay, then how do I make it right?”

“There’s no making it right. You can’t rewind time, Cal. You can’t bring them back.” I raised my right hand, the one he hadn’t seen yet, the one that was holding a gun, and laid it across my knees. “There’s only making it even.”

It gave me a certain dark satisfaction to watch his eyes go wide, see his cheeks pale. He started to push up from the ground, and I raised the gun, steady and sure. “Don’t,” I told him. He didn’t, dropped back down to sitting. He knew about me and guns. How good I was. Hell, I’d learned at his knee.

“What are you doing, Evie?” he asked.

“I think you know.” I thumbed the safety off and watched his gaze follow the movement. “Even if what you did to Junie was an accident, all this time, you let me wonder what happened. You let me think Junie was keeping secrets from me about Izzy. You let me drive myself crazy about the explosion at Matt’s trailer, when it was you who’d lit the match. You let me feel guilty for accusing you of being Izzy’s older guy when you’d actually done something so much worse. I told you, I told everyone at that press conference, what I’d do when I found the person who killed her. You had fair warning.”

When Cal swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbed like he’d swallowed a rock. I wondered how hard his heart was hammering. Mine felt even and smooth as glass. “This is me, Evie,” he said. “I fucked up. I know I did. But you can’t kill me.”

“Sure I can.” The conversational tone of my voice surprised even me. I raised the gun, close enough there was no chance of missing him. A sure-thing target.

“Where’d you get the gun?” he asked, voice quiet. He already knew, but he wanted to make me say it.

“Mama,” I said, after a pause. “Because you made a mistake, Cal. One of many, as it turns out. You introduced her to Junie. The one thing I asked you never to do. The one thing you promised me you never would. The day Junie was born, you held my hand in the hospital, you looked into my eyes, and you swore to me you’d never let Mama get near her. We were going to stop it from happening all over again. Stop her from ever getting her claws into Junie. But you lied.” He opened his mouth to speak, and I shushed him by tightening my finger on the trigger. “And guess what? Mama loved my girl. She loved her more than me. More than you. More than anything. When she found out what you’d done? She couldn’t give me this gun fast enough. And you know Mama, this gun’s passed through so many hands, it’s probably untraceable. She’s already got a story all cooked up for where you are, what happened to you.”