I contact my lawyer. Scarlet picks up on the second ring. When I explain the situation—the entire version—she is quiet for exactly six seconds and then she says: “Are you safe right now?”
“Yes.”
“Are you somewhere you can stay for seventy-two hours?”
I look at Ryan across the table. “Yes.”
“Then stay there. I’ll call you back on this number today. Do not move.”
She hangs up.
Jack looks at the phone. “I like her.”
“She’s terrifying,” I say.
“That’s exactly why I like her.”
* * *
Law enforcement comes at noon. Two vehicles, marked, and a third that is unmarked but obvious. They come through the main entrance of town rather than the back approach, which means they’ve done more work overnight than a plate search.
Ryan knows before they reach Main Street.
The pack bond, I assume, or the town’s network, which I’ve been learning is its own kind of distributed early warning system. Elsie, Danny, Doris Harrow and approximately sixty other people who have absorbed the information that something is happening and have calibrated their awareness accordingly.
We’re in Tristan’s café, doing inventory when it happens.
“Stay here,” Ryan says to me.
I glance at him.
“Please,” he adds.
That’s the first time he’s said please. I register this. “Five minutes,” I reply. “And then I come out.”
“Five minutes,” he agrees, and he goes.
I last three minutes. What I can see from the café’s window at the three-minute mark stops me cold.
Not because of the law enforcement vehicles. Notbecause of Ryan standing at the edge of the cobblestones with the stillness that means he has positioned himself and intends to stay positioned.
Because of thetown.
They’re already there.
Not organized. Not with signs or a unified stance or any of the visual language of a coordinated response. Just… people. Filling the street. On their porches and their sidewalks and their shop doorways, and then moving, quietly, with the unhurried purpose of people who have somewhere to be and have decided that somewhere is here.
Moving toward me.
Toward where I am.
Elsie from the gas station walks across the street and takes a position at the edge of the cobblestones. The bookshop owner comes out of his door and stands in front of it. Danny from the potato stall—who has been at this carnival for twelve years and carries the authority of someone who has fed this town for all of them—walks to the center of the street and simply stands there.
Doris Harrow comes out of her house in her good coat.
Jenny brings her lawn chair from her noodle shop.
And then more. The woman from the flower shop. The teenagers who work the carnival rides. The couple from the pub. The man who fixes the clock tower. People I’ve learned the names of and people I onlyknow by face and people I’ve never seen before who have apparently decided that this morning requires their presence.
