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"Then how do we stand anywhere?"

I don't have an answer for that, so I don't give her one.

She's quiet for a second. "I put my fingers on her wrist. After."

"Why?"

"Because I wanted to know what it was doing." She won't look at me. "It was steady, Gage. Same as mine is right now, and I've been shaking since the tree line."

"You want to tell me the rest of it?"

"No." She pushes off the post. "But I'm going to have to say something at the barn, and you should know I'm not going to lie for her."

"I'd never ask you to."

"I know. That's why I came."

Ansel comes as far as the bottom step and no further, which is the only courtesy he's ever paid me.

He looks past me down the hall and he sees it hanging over my counter. To his credit, his face does almost nothing.

"You walked out of your own vote," he says.

"I did."

"So it doesn't count."

"No."

"Dawn, then." He puts his hands in his coat. "In the barn. All of them, and this time you stay in the room until it's done."

"Dario's gone."

"I heard." Something moves under it. He's known that man for twenty years. "That's what I'll be saying at dawn, Gage. Not that she's evil. Not that she deserves anything. Just that a man of ours went missing in your yard tonight, and there's a witch in your kitchen holding half a monster in the air, and I'm going to ask forty people to keep standing here anyway."

"She kept Cass alive."

"I know she did." He looks at me for a long moment. "I won’t forget that."

He gets three steps toward his truck and stops.

"For what it's worth," he says, without turning, "I hope you win it."

Then he keeps walking.

He's not wrong.

I know.

The house empties out by ten. Neal goes to a doctor of ours two towns over. Cass takes six stitches at my kitchen table without changing expression and drives herself home against my advice.

Maren stands at the counter looking at the loaf like it’s going to attack her.

I fold the towel. Then I fold it again, smaller, and I put it in my inside jacket pocket, and it goes in flat against the envelope that's already there.

Two things in my pocket now we need to talk about.

She doesn't see me do it.