“I’m sorry,” Bear said from the stairs. He stood with his shoulders square, his hands open. He hadn’t seen me hit my face.

“You should have told me,” I said with my back to him.

“It’s usually a deal breaker,” he said, light.

I turned around, not smiling. When he came closer, he looked at my face, where it was flaming, and at the wall, where my face had left a mark in the fresh paint.

“Were you just not going to tell me?” I said.

“I was,” he said.

“When?”

He slid his fingers along my cheekbone, where it pulsed under his touch. And then down the line of my jaw, his thumb over the curve of my top lip.

“Soon,” he said, low.

“What else don’t I know?” I said.

He leaned in and kissed the skin in front of my ear, not where I’d smashed my face but behind that, a soft, tender spot. My skin prickled with his breathing.

“I’ll tell you,” he said.

He didn’t have his hands on me anymore. Just his mouth. He grazed his lips over the hot part of my cheek, where my face throbbed underneath. I could feel my pulse.

“What are you going to tell me?” he asked. I had to grip his shirt to keep from falling over. My knees were turning to water.

Anything, I thought. Anything you want to hear. He could ask me to kill someone, with his lips on my ear, and I would do it.

TWENTY: KATERI

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 25

It’s not a jail; it’s a justice center. It’s where both Kateri and Joel have small offices adjacent to each other, where Chief Whittaker has a large office with a wall of windows, where the deputies have their cubicles. And it’s where Shannon Jenkins is held in one of a few small cells. If he is ordered to stay incarcerated after his arraignment, they will move him to a county prison outside of town. If he is convicted on even one count of murder, he will end up in maximum.

He is likely to be charged with one count of second-degree murder in the killing of Craig O’Neil, second-degree murder in the killing of his mother, and first-degree kidnapping.

She can’t imagine him in maximum, his thin arms and his soft face.

“I don’t think it was forethought,” she says to Hurt.

“Really?” he says. He stands with his back to her in her own office, fidgeting with the fat leaves on a jade plant on top of the filing cabinet. “Don’t be naïve, Fisher.”

“I just don’t,” she says again, but looks down. It weakens her argument, she knows, but she feels weak about all of it, like she put herself on the line.

“It’s an open-and-shut case, Fisher,” he says. “All the pieces are there.”

“They don’t fit,” she says. “We can’t confirm the murder weapon without a body. A good defense lawyer will eat this case alive,” she added.

“That’s not our job. Our job is just to arrest him.”