Deirdre chose it in the rain, on a dock, against her own child.

It did not undo the twenty years.

Nothing could.

But she stood in that cold light and refused, at last, to look away, and there was a broken kind of courage in it that I could not entirely hate.

Then the man at the back of the shed looked at his buzzing phone, went white, and bolted for the loading door, and a moment later the night outside filled with light and a voice through a bullhorn — State police.

Come out with your hands where we can see them. Red and blue swept across the frosted windows.