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“I didn’t think he did.”

Nick pulled a chair away from the table but didn’t sit down. “Then let us get rid of him.”

I shifted Sparrow onto my hip and turned to fill the kettle. “No. If you run him out of town, I won’t get either answer.”

By the time I turned around, Nick had both hands braced on the table. “He hurt you.”

“Yeah.”

Sparrow reached for him. Nick straightened and gave her his finger without taking his eyes off me. She wrapped both hands around it and pulled it toward her mouth.

“I hate this,” he said.

I nodded.

“He doesn’t get to just be here.”

I switched the kettle on. “He does, though. It’s a town. Anyone can be in a town.”

Nick finally sat down. I made the tea. He drank three cups and held Sparrow through most of her nap. He didn’t mention Seb again. When Moff came up the path at five, Nick handed Sparrow back to me and left.

Moff didn’t come in. He stood on the porch with his hands in his coat pockets and gave me his report from there.

They’d been checking since ten. Phones, records, accounts and every person who knew where I was. Seb had called Robin once, not long after I left. Robin had lied, and none of us had heard a word from him since. Until today. Either he’d found a new lead or something JW had put in place to hide me had failed.

“We’ll find out what brought him here.”

“I know you will.”

“It held for a year,” Moff said. “Things don’t just stop holding. Something changed. Maybe something we did. Maybe something somebody did to us. Until I know which, I don’t know whether there’s a hole.”

The how didn’t bother me. Seb wasn’t a danger to us. Whatever else that man is, whatever he’d done to me in front of everybody, he would protect Sparrow with everything he had. I’d never doubted it for one second of one day.

So no. The how didn’t keep me up.

“Moff.”

“Mm.”

“Do the work. Fix the seam. But don’t grind yourself down on my account.”

“Doing it because it’s my job,” he said, and went back down the steps. He got into his truck but didn’t start the engine. With Robin asleep upstairs, Moff wasn’t going anywhere.

I watched his truck from the front room while Sparrow fed and came back to the one question none of them could answer.

Why was Seb here?

Daddy’s Little Bug. It was a bad joke about bugs in code for the man who spent his life hunting them. I’d imagined him reading it twice, then running his thumb over the letters before he looked up at me. Four of the other old ladies were pregnant. Handful would have added us to the baby pool as soon as Seb told them.

It would have landed three or four days after I left.

For the first few days, I forgot all about it. By the time I remembered, I assumed anything addressed to me had been thrown away or packed with the rest of my things. None of the messages from Austen, Indira, Lilac or Bea mentioned a pregnancy or a baby. Austen especially could never have kept that out of a message if she’d known.

So I believed he didn’t know.

I had thought about telling him. But what was I supposed to say? You told me to get out and made it clear we were finished, but I’m pregnant with your child, so you’re stuck with me. I’d never seen anger like that in his eyes before. He’d been so certain I’d cheated that nothing I said reached him. When he kicked me out of the clubhouse, it had felt final.

If I’d told him, he might have said the baby wasn’t his. He’d believed the video over me; I couldn’t bear to hear him call our child another man’s. And if he did believe me, I was afraid of what came next.