Chapter 2 — The Weapon on the Table

I drove home in a state of clinical detachment.

The Sacramento heat shimmered off the asphalt, but inside the car I was freezing.

The woman who’d driven to the hospital an hour earlier was dead, killed by a few sentences spoken in Room 412.

I pulled into the driveway of my small single-story house in Arden-Arcade. The paint was peeling around the window frames, the lawn scorched yellow.

This was the house Colton wanted to liquidate — the roof he was willing to sell out from under me.

I walked straight to the kitchen table, scarred from years of sewing pins and scissors but lately serving a darker purpose: the command center where I sorted medical bills, final notices, and overdraft warnings.