Wren had begged Aunt Bex to bring her here. If she had talked to her dad, maybe they could have made an appointment with a gynecologist. Maybe she would be snagging a lollipop from a basket on her way out. (Did gynecologists even have those? Or were they just for pediatricians’ offices?)

Then again, she never could have asked her father. He didn’t even let her wear spaghetti straps to school. All he knew about Ryan was that they were working together on a chemistry project.

Which was kind of true.

But what was combustible was the two of them. Wren thought about the kisses that made her lips feel like they’d been blistered; about how his hand snaked under her shirt and ignited her skin. She thought of the giddy rush of adrenaline that flooded her when they scrambled apart a breath before Ryan’s mother opened the door, her arms full of groceries.

Had she told her father about Ryan, he would have been waiting on the hairpin turn near the high school to give Ryan a ticket for driving too fast or too slow or too erratically. He would have done a background check. He would have convinced himself that this boy did not deserve Wren.

There was nothing her father wouldn’t do for her. But there were also things her father couldn’t do for her. When she had gotten her period two years ago, the cramps had been so bad she’d told her dad she was sick and couldn’t go to school. He held his hand to her forehead, dubious, because she didn’t have a fever. “I have cramps,” she told him flatly, and he went bright red and stumbled out of her room. He returned an hour later with two bags from CVS—Gatorade, Advil, a Matchbox car, a Rubik’s Cube, a pack of Bazooka gum, a little puzzle with a picture of a kitten. He set them on the foot of her bed, as if he couldn’t bring himself to get too close to her. “For your … um … lady-stomach,” he murmured.

Seriously, how could she ask a man who couldn’t even say the word cramps to bring her somewhere to get birth control?

She had turned to her aunt for help, and it had almost cost Bex her life. It still might.

In her sneaker, her cellphone vibrated. She crossed her ankles, wondering if anyone else had heard the buzz, knowing it was probably her dad.

He would not let anything bad happen to her. Even if she could not reach her phone and tell him she was all right.

Sometimes when her father came home from work and was particularly quiet, Wren knew that he’d had a really shitty day. He once told her that being a detective meant you had to peel back the pretty of a town, and see its festering wounds: who was an addict, who was beating his wife, who was drowning in debt, who was suicidal. But he never told her details. She had accused him once of treating her like a baby. It’s not that I want to hide anything from you, he’d told her. It’s that if I tell you, you’ll never look at people the same way.

Wren turned back to the nurse, and then to each of the other women. “I’m Wren,” she whispered.

“Izzy,” said the nurse softly. “And this is Dr. Ward.”

The man lifted a hand, but that was all he could manage.

The woman with a bruise on her forehead met her gaze. “Janine,” she mouthed.

“Joy,” whispered the woman in sweats.

“What’s he gonna—”

“Ssh,” Izzy hushed, as the man returned, dragging Olive from the closet and unceremoniously shoving her into the space beside Wren.

“Sorry, ma’am,” the shooter said to Olive.

And then he pointed the gun at Wren’s face.

—

IT WAS THE SECOND TIME Olive had come out of the closet, and it was equally traumatic. Now, she glanced around the room. Wren was shaking like a leaf, her wrists bound. There were red marks on her skin where the gunman had yanked her out of their hiding spot. It was a wonder he hadn’t dislocated the girl’s arm.

Seeing his roughness, Olive had been the most docile, subservient hostage imaginable as he hauled her out of the utility closet, too. She pleaded with him—what could a sixty-eight-year-old woman do to him, after all? And it had worked. Like most men, he saw only her petite frame, and not the strength of her mind. He pushed her into a couch next to Wren, but he said, Sorry ma’am. And he didn’t restrain her as he had Wren. Now her brain—her celebrated retired-professor brain—was working in triple time to find a way out of this situation.

He started waving the gun at Olive and Wren. It bounced between them with each syllable, like the little ball on the screen at a sing-along. “Did you think you could hide from me? Did you?”

Olive was trying to be strong, really she was. Peg, her wife, was always the first to tell her she often worried herself into a panic about things that didn’t come to pass. Like, for example, a mark on her shoulder that she was certain was a tick bite heralding the onset of Lyme disease. (It wasn’t.) A news report about another missile fired off by North Korea, which Olive thought would start World War III. (It hadn’t.) “Eeyore,” Peg would call her, and in this moment of all moments, the thought made Olive smile.

Well, Peg, I’m in a room with a crazy guy waving a gun and five other hostages. Is it all right to panic now?

“You lied to me!” He turned, the force of his anger bending over the woman who was wearing scrubs. A nurse? “You told me that closet was empty!”

The woman cowered, her arms shielding her face. “I didn’t—”

“Shut up! Shut your goddamn mouth!” he yelled.

In addition to Olive and Wren, there were three other women. There was a young woman in sweatpants, and another one with a big bruise on her temple. There was the nurse, whose name must have been Izzy, because the man she was tending to kept calling her that. The doctor, maybe? He was in scrubs, like her. He was big enough to take down the gunman, if not for the fact that his leg looked like hamburger below the thigh, and he was in obvious pain.

Wren’s aunt was nowhere to be seen.

And then there was the gunman. He was middle-aged—maybe forty, maybe forty-five. He was wiry, but strong. Strong enough to haul a fighting teenager out of hiding. A silver stubble of beard rubbed along the coastline of his jaw. There was nothing about him that would have made Olive look twice at him on the street, unless their eyes had met. Then, she might have just stopped and stared. His eyes were almost colorless. His gaze felt like a sucking wound.

“I’m sorry,” Olive said, in her thickest Elderly Southern Lady accent. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced. I’m Miz Olive.”

“I don’t care who you are,” he said.

One of the other women caught her eye and glanced at the television overhead, where the news was streaming in a weird metaphysical mirror, a reporter with this very clinic over his shoulder. GUNMAN IDENTIFIED AS GEORGE GODDARD, a caption below read.

“Well, George,” she said evenly, as if they were sitting down to lemonade. “Lovely to make your acquaintance.”

He may have been unhinged, but he was from the South, where even the unhinged had mothers and grandmothers who drilled decades of manners into them. Olive did not believe in using her age except for discount prices on movie tickets and to get 10 percent off at Kroger the second Tuesday of the month. And now, apparently, in a hostage situation.

George Goddard was sweating profusely, running his free hand over his brow and wiping it on his pants leg. Olive had a neuroscience background, but she could do armchair diagnosis with the best of them. Grandiose claims about the self. A sense of entitlement. Lack of empathy. A tendency to lash out, when they feel like they’re not being respected.

Narcissistic personality disorder.

Or homegrown terrorist, Olive thought. Either would fit.

If you could see me, Peg, she thought. Olive was the one who peeked from between her fingers during scary movies, who still sometimes had to check the closet before going to bed to make sure there was nothing lurking inside (and goodness, after this episode, she would be doing that all the time). But here she was calmly playing the old lady for all it was worth, the only postmenopausal one in the bunch.

Surely he knew she hadn’t come here to get an abortion.

Did it even matter?

The girl beside her burst into tears. Olive wrapped her arms around Wren, trying to will her strength.

The man knelt down, his eyes clouding for a second. “Don’t cry,” he said to Wren, his voice catching. “Please don’t cry …” He reached out to her with his free hand.

There was something in the way he was looking at Wren, but wasn’t seeing her, thought Olive. In his mind’s eye, this was someone else, maybe someone about her age, who had come to this clinic against his wishes. After all, what else would have set him off?

If Olive was right, and she usually was, what had happened to that other girl?