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Somebody shushes her. Nobody shushes the rest of them.

I knew it would go like this. These people would rather believe the preacher's girl ran off with a Hollister than believe somebody took her. If somebody took me, then everybody in this room has to ask why none of them went looking.

Daddy doesn't come down out of the pulpit, and he doesn't say my name. He takes his hands off the wood and tucks them behind his back, but not before I see them shaking.

"Let's..." He clears his throat. "Let's take a moment and greet one another."

All over the sanctuary, people stand and turn to shake hands, glad to have something to do besides stare at me. Knox stands, so I stand.

In the second pew, right in front of me, a man with silver hair turns around.

Coleman Whitlock owns Whitlock Cellars, the winery west of town where the tour buses stop. He joined the fellowship a couple of years before I was taken. Every Sunday he sat in this second pew in a pressed shirt with the cuffs turned back once, and every Sunday he shook Daddy's hand at the door.

In all that time, the only word he ever said to the girl at the piano was 'Morning.' He said it the way a man reads a word off a card, and then he walked on past me.

On my way in, I passed a brass plaque in the vestibule that wasn't there a year ago.

THIS ROOF GIVEN TO THE GLORY OF GOD BY DEACON COLEMAN WHITLOCK

He holds his hand out to me over the back of the pew.

"Delilah." His voice is quiet. Around us people are talking and laughing and shaking hands, and he still doesn't raise it, as if he knows I'm listening for it. "We've all been praying for you. The Lord has brought you home."

I know that voice. It came out of the dark corner of the cigar room, where the lamp didn't reach.

It said, 'That's enough,' and the crop stopped landing on my shoulders. It said, 'She goes on tonight's truck,' and it sounded almost bored.

Down there he barely ever spoke, and when he did, it was a few quiet words through a rubber mask, across a stone room full of smoke. I never once thought of the man who said 'Morning' to me at the piano.

Now he's said a whole sentence to me across the back of a pew, and there's no mistaking it.

For one second I'm back on that stone floor with my eyes on the ground and the zip tie digging into my wrists. Then I'm standing in my father's church in a blue dress.

The man from the corner is smiling at me over a pew. It's a soft, sorry smile, the kind a deacon gives a girl who's had a hard year. I never saw the face behind his mask, and I'm looking at it now.

My hands have gone ice cold. I don't take his.

Beside me, Knox's eyes are on Whitlock's hand hanging in the air between us. He keeps his own hand at his side.

"Coleman," he says, and his voice is flat.

"Knox. Good to see you in the Lord's house." Whitlock's eyes drop to the holster on Knox's hip and come back up, and his smile never changes. "Though I'd have thought you'd leave that in your truck."

"I didn't."

Whitlock lowers his hand without any hurry, still smiling, like nothing anybody in this church could do would ever touch him. Then he turns back around to face the pulpit.

I stare at the back of his silver head and put it together.

Through the bars of my cell, I heard enough to know my father owes the man in the corner money. Coleman Whitlock is my father's deacon, and he bought my father's church a new roof while I was gone.

Knox told me that the day after Hector found me, Daddy was in the feed store and the Cattle Guard asking about me. Ozzie hadn't heard him say my name in town all year.

I'd already figured whoever sat in that corner told Daddy I got out and sent him looking. Now I'm sure that man is sitting in front of me.

The night I got out, I ran through rows of oak wine barrels under the security lights, with the same brand burned into every one. There are wineries all along the highway west of town, and I never saw a sign on that building. One of them belongs to the man who just greeted me.

I can't prove one word of it. All I have is a voice, and the man it belongs to just put a roof over this whole congregation. Nobody in this county is going to haul in a deacon on the word of a girl they all think ran off.