“Yesterday, when Ness turned that gun on you…” Cady shook her head, her lips pressed into a thin white line. “I just kept thinking that it should have been me.” She paused, then repeated herself. “It should have been me, Kira, and not just then. When you were a kid, growing up in that house, fighting for your life in the forest, the years afterward when you had to fight so hard just to look people in the eye…it should have been me.” Cady’s voice shook. “There should be a way for a parent to do that for their child, to go through the things that no kid should have to go through, to feel every ounce of that pain so that you feel none.” She let out a ragged breath. “But there’s not. There are things that I can’t protect you from and things that I can’t undo, and it breaks me. It breaks me in ways that I hope you never understand, but I have never—not once, not even for a moment—wanted to protect you because I thought you couldn’t handle something. I just…” Cady lost her grip on her emotions then. I’d never seen her cry before, and I thought of Jude, deciding that he didn’t need to know about his father if asking hurt her so badly. “I thought you shouldn’t have to,” Cady said finally. “I thought that maybe once—just once—I could be strong for you.”

“Once?” I asked, the muscles in my chest constricting. “Cady, you’ve been there every day—”

“I’m your mom.” Cady reached out and laid a hand gently against my cheek. “It’s my job.”

I leaned into her touch and thought about Jude saying that she would have taken a bullet for either of us. I thought about how close we’d come to losing each other the day before.

“And speaking of a mother’s job,” Cady said, pulling it together and fixing me with a capital-L Look. “If you ever literally step into the line of fire again, I will—”

She cut off abruptly, and I realized we had company. Bales came to stand on my other side. “Don’t mind me,” he told Cady mildly. “By all means, try to find an effective way of threatening a fearless child.”

Cady snorted. She wasn’t fearless. Neither was I, but it was clear from her father’s tone that he saw himself as having been in her position more than once.

“I expect you’ll be leaving soon.” There was no judgment whatsoever in Bales Bennett’s tone.

“We will,” Cady said. “Mac is going to come back with us—at least for a little while.” She paused, and the silence stretched out like a canyon between them, until Cady muttered three little words. “You could, too.”