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"Same thing when the omission takes away her choice."

Wyatt looked past me at the wool blanket, then back. "We don't have time for you to turn inherited dysfunction into a personal religion."

"Watch her."

"I am."

"Cash too."

"He is."

"No one lets her leave."

His expression changed a fraction. Not annoyance. Concern answering concern.

"She gave you her word."

"So did I."

The whiteboard came back. Well. Really? Mm.

Wyatt understood. He always did when the damage had already become logistical.

"I'll handle it," he said.

The family love language.

Then he went to make calls, leaving a lawyer's number with Hutchins and half his legal pad copied onto the desk.

I talked to counsel. Answered questions. Repeated "porch" until it stopped sounding like a place and became a hole in an alibi. No, nobody saw me. No, no camera covered my cabin. No, my phone had stayed on the nightstand. Yes, I owned a truck resembling the vehicle described. Yes, I had been convicted of misdemeanor assault behind the same bar five years earlier. No, I had offered no defense then.

Every silence earns interest.

Near dark, footsteps came through the outer office.

I stood.

I expected Josie. I knew Hutchins wouldn't let her back to the cell itself, but I expected the top of her head beyond the partition, the oversized coat, some piece of her entering my line of sight so my body could stop counting distance.

Cash came around the corner alone.

He had no grin. No hat either. His sandy hair stood up where he'd been dragging his hand through it, and he carried one folded piece of paper like it weighed enough to bow him.

He stopped outside the bars.

Wouldn't look at me.

"Where is she?"

Cash swallowed.

"Boo."

"Where."

"We thought she was in the cabin. Wyatt had her there after—after you left. Biscuit was with her. I checked at four-thirty. She said she was going to lie down."

My hands closed around the bars.