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At some point tonight I came apart in front of all of them to get through a barrier that was never going to let me through, and I didn't care, and I still don't, and now four hundred pounds of what I am is on someone's phone.

Ours, my wolf says, close and easy, still lying on that pile inside me like he intends to stay.

I know. That's not the issue tonight.

"I can put a fog over it." Evelyn's already got her gloves back on. "All of it. By Sunday they'll have built something ordinary out of the pieces and they'll defend it to your face. It's the one thing we're genuinely good at."

Ansel comes off the wall so fast the chair leg screams on the parquet.

"Do it."

"Ansel."

"I've got a sister with two kids in this county, Gage." His voice isn't loud. That's what makes it land. "Forty of us. They've got our faces."

"I know what they've got."

"Then let her."

"No," Maren says.

She hasn't gotten off the floor yet. She's sitting where I put her with one hand still in my shirt, and she says it to Evelyn, not to Ansel.

"You already wrote down what happened to a Bell once." Her voice is wrecked and perfectly level. "You called it necessary and you filed it. You are not reaching into three hundred people tonight and deciding what they get to remember about me."

Evelyn doesn't argue. Something moves behind her face, the thing I couldn't name on her own gravel five days ago, and she puts her hands in her pockets and steps back.

Ansel looks at me.

Forty families. His sister's kids. Every reason I've spent six years being the thing people cross the street to avoid.

"She's right," I tell him.

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got." I get my hand under Maren's arm. "Three minutes."

She walks out onto the steps and I go with her, and the lawn goes quiet in a wave, back to front.

Here's what I'm braced for. I've had six years of practice at what a crowd does when I come out a door.

Nobody flinches.

A woman near the bottom step is holding her kid's coat and she hands it up to me, just hands it to me, because I'm the biggest thing standing near a pile of coats.

Maren doesn't make a speech. She wouldn't know how.

"Is anybody hurt?" she says.

Nothing for a second. Then a man in a plague doctor mask says his wife's ankle, and someone says the Doyle boy cut his hand on the terrace glass.

"Cider table," Maren says. "Sit her down. Cass?"

"On it."

And that's the whole four minutes. It turns out what a town wants at ten past midnight is not an explanation. It's someone they already know telling them where to sit.

The old man who runs the hardware store gets there first.