He’d never get custody, her lawyer assured her. Almost certainly not.

So then why go to court?

Because fighting him would cost Maeve everything.

The children whining in their sleep, faces pink and slick with sweat. She’d given them ice packs to cool their pillows, a wet facecloth chilled in the freezer and laid across each hot belly. The cat yowled by the back door and woke them. Still she kept it locked.

He’s just not over you.

Maeve in the rocking chair with a cushion in her lap. Under the cushion, a kitchen knife. She knew this was useless. Worse than useless: the scar on her hand a constant reminder of how easily a weapon could be turned against you.

He wouldn’t get it out of her hand this time.

It was easy to imagine him coming to the door. He’d done it before, stood on the step, pounding. Rattled her windows to see if they were locked. Maeve could see the dead bolt from where she sat, could picture, not a turning of the lock, but a crowbar splinter, the frame coming loose from the wall around it. One fist and then an arm breaking through. A boot, kicking its way in.

She’d go for his face first, the knife cleaving down the length of his nose, splitting him in two. He wouldn’t expect that from her. He would expect something low down and lame, a few stabs to his soft parts. She didn’t want to aim for his heart or his guts or even his balls. She wanted him gone.

After a few hours, she stopped waiting for him to come to the door but imagined instead circling the house herself. Going out the back entrance, along the high hedge, through the neighbor’s yard, and down that way. Into the back seat behind him. Slicing his throat.

She’s small and light and she knows how to move fast.

This is what she thought about during the whole long night. He stayed there in his car till the sun came up again. He stayed till other people started other cars, until the smell of coffee and bacon and gasoline began to move through the heavy air. She thought he’d never leave her alone.

Until he did, she tells herself now. He did go. He got on a plane and the plane took him so far away that he couldn’t come back.

An accident. Kind of.

Sometimes she wonders if she willed it. The shooter. Can you do that? Can you wish someone dead so fiercely that your wish transmits? A child’s question.

She is not a child.

Dreams, Karo said, are a way of working out the past. Not the future. But Maeve is aware that she’s still the same woman she was that night, with as much to fight for—even if the children aren’t sleeping upstairs but waiting for her, far away, at home.

She closes her eyes now to expel the memory, to wash it clean.