An empty oral medicine syringe slid out into her palm — the small plastic kind with no needle, the kind meant for giving liquid to a child.

“I hid it in my shoe,” Junia said, “because Daddy checks our pockets before we go anywhere.”

Cordell felt something go hot and vertical up his spine, a hard clean anger, and he kept every trace of it off his face and out of his voice, because the anger was his to manage and not one ounce of it belonged to this child.

It was that one detail — Daddy checks our pockets — that told him the most, and that he would think about for a long time afterward.

Because it meant this was not the first search of her small life.

It meant Junia lived in a house where a child had learned, the way you learn the layout of a room in the dark, that her pockets were not her own, that the adult who was supposed to be her safety was instead a thing to be outmaneuvered, and that if you wanted to keep something — a secret, a treasure, the truth — you had to hide it somewhere he wouldn’t think to look.