How could he go back, period?

Eight hours ago this had seemed like a holy crusade—an eye for an eye, a life for a life.

His wound had a heartbeat. George tried to adjust the binding of the gauze around it with his teeth, but it was unraveling. It should have been tied off better, but who here was going to help him?

The last time he had felt like this, like the walls were closing in on him, he had taken his infant daughter—red and screaming with a fever he didn’t know she had and wouldn’t have known how to treat—and gone looking for help. He had driven until his truck ran out of gas—it was past one A.M., but he started walking—and continued until he found the only building with a light on inside, and an unlocked door. It was flat-roofed and unremarkable—he hadn’t known it was a church until he stepped inside and saw the benches and the wooden relief of Jesus on the cross. The lights he had seen outside were candles, flickering on an altar. Come back, he had said out loud to his wife, who was probably halfway across the country by now. Maybe he was tired, maybe he was delusional, but he very clearly heard a reply: I’m already with you. The voice whispered from the wooden Jesus and at the same time from the darkness all around him.

George’s conversion had been that simple, and that enveloping. Somehow, he and his girl had fallen asleep on the carpeted floor. In the morning, Pastor Mike was shaking him awake. The pastor’s wife was cooing at his baby. There was a groaning table of food, and a miraculously spare room. Back then, George hadn’t been a religious man. It wasn’t Jesus that entered his heart that day. It was hope.

Hugh McElroy, the hostage negotiator George had been talking to for hours, said George’s daughter would know he had been trying to protect her. He’d promised that if George cooperated, this could still end well, even though George knew that outside this building were men with rifles trained on the door just waiting for him to emerge.

George wanted this to be over. Really, he did. He was exhausted mentally and physically and it was hard to figure out an endgame. He was sick of the crying. He wanted to skip ahead to the part where he was sitting by his daughter again, and she was looking up at him with wonder, the way she used to.

But George also knew Hugh would say anything to get him to surrender to the police. It wasn’t even just his job. Hugh McElroy needed him to release the hostages for the same reason that George had taken them in the first place—to save the day.

That’s when George figured out what he was going to do. He pulled back the hammer on the gun. “Get up. You,” he said, pointing to the girl with the name of a bird, the one who had stabbed him. The one he would use to teach Hugh McElroy a lesson.

—

HERE WAS THE PRIMARY RULE of hostage negotiation: Don’t fuck it up.

When Hugh had first joined the regional team, that’s what the instructors said. Don’t take a bad situation and make it worse. Don’t argue with the hostage taker. Don’t tell him, I get it, because you probably don’t. Communicate in a way that soothes or minimizes the threat; and understand that sometimes the best communication is not speaking at all. Active listening can get you a lot farther than spouting off.

There were different kinds of hostage takers. There were those who were out of their head with drugs, alcohol, grief. There were those on a political mission. There were those who fanned an ember of revenge, until it flared up and burned them alive. Then there were the sociopaths—the ones who had no empathy to appeal to. And yet sometimes they were the easiest to deal with, because they understood the concept of who’s in control. If you could make the sociopath believe that you were not going to cede the upper hand, you’d actually gotten somewhere. You could say, We’ve been at this for two hours (or six, or sixteen) and I get what’s on your mind. But it’s time to do something new. Because there is a group of men out here who think time’s up and want to address this with force. Sociopaths understood force.

On the other hand, that approach would fail miserably with someone depressed enough to kill himself and take others with him.

The point of establishing a relationship with a hostage taker was to make sure that you were the only source of information, and to give you the time to find out critical information of your own. What kind of hostage taker were you facing? What had precipitated the standoff, the shoot-out, the point of no return? You might start trying to build a relationship with innocuous conversation about sports, weather, TV. You’d gradually find out his likes and dislikes, what mattered to him. Did he love his kids? His wife? His mom? Why?

If you could find the why, you could determine what could be done to disarm the situation.

Hugh knew that the best hostage negotiators called the job a ballet, a tightrope walk, a delicate dance.

He also knew that was bullshit.

No one ever interviewed the negotiators whose situations ended in a bloodbath. It was only the ones with successful outcomes who got microphones stuck in their faces, and who felt obligated to describe their work as some kind of mystical art. In reality, it was a crapshoot. Dumb luck.

Hugh McElroy was afraid his luck was about to run out.

He surveyed the scene he had spearheaded for the past few hours. His command center was an event tent the department had used a few weeks ago at a community fair to promote safe child fingerprinting. Beat cops were posted along the building’s perimeter like a string of blue beads. The press had been corralled behind a police barricade. (You’d think they’d be smart enough to get further out of the range of a madman with a gun, but no, the lure of ratings was apparently too high.) Littered on the sidewalk like empty threats were placards with giant pictures of babies in utero, or hand-drawn slogans: ADOPTION, NOT ABORTION! IT’S A CHILD, NOT A CHOICE.

Ambulances hunkered, manned by EMTs with foil blankets and portable IVs and hydration. The SWAT team was in position waiting for a signal. Their commander, Captain Quandt, had tried to boot Hugh off the case (who could blame him?) and take the shooter by force. But Hugh knew Quandt could do neither of these things in good conscience, not if Hugh was on the verge of getting George Goddard to surrender.

This was exactly what Hugh had been banking on when he broke the second rule of hostage negotiation five hours ago, screaming onto the scene in his unmarked car, barking orders to the two street cops who’d been first responders.

The secondary rule of hostage negotiation was Don’t forget that this is a job.

Hostage negotiation is not a test of your manhood. It is not a chance to be a knight in shining armor, or a way to get your fifteen minutes of fame. It may go your way and it may not, no matter how textbook your responses are. Don’t take it personally.

But Hugh had known from the get-go that was never going to be possible, not today, not this time, because this was a different situation altogether. There were God knew how many dead bodies in that clinic, plus five hostages who were still alive. And one of them was his kid.

The SWAT commander was suddenly standing in front of him. “We’re going in now,” Quandt said. “I’m telling you as a courtesy.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Hugh replied. “I’m telling you as a courtesy.”

Quandt turned away and started to speak into the walkie-talkie at his shoulder. “We’re a go in five … four …” Suddenly his voice broke. “Stand down! I repeat—abort!”

It was the word that had started this disaster. Hugh’s head flew up, and he saw the same thing Quandt had noticed.

The front door of the clinic had suddenly opened, and two women were stepping outside.

—

WHEN WREN’S MOTHER STILL LIVED with them, she’d had a spider plant that she kept on top of a bookcase in the living room. After she left, neither Wren nor her father ever remembered to water it, but that spider plant seemed to defy death. It began to spill over its container and grow in a strange verdant comb-over toward a window, without playing by the rules of logic or gravity.

Wren felt like that now, swaying on her feet toward the light every time the door opened, drawn to where her father stood in the parking lot outside.