My whole future hinges on the breath between that sentence and his next.

“There’s evidence that Ruth Jefferson may have been at fault in the death of your son. And that it could have been a racially motivated incident,” MacDougall says. “I’m putting in a call to the district attorney’s office.”

“Thank you,” I say gruffly, and I hang up the phone. Then my knees give out, and I land heavily in front of the damaged sill. I can feel Francis’s hand on my shoulder. Even though there’s no barrier between me and the outside, I struggle to breathe.

“I’m sorry, Turk,” Francis says, misinterpreting my response.

“Don’t be.” I pull myself up and run to the dark bedroom where Brit is hibernating beneath a mound of covers. I throw open the curtains and let the sun flood the room. I watch her roll over, wincing, squinting, and I take her hand.

I can’t give her our baby. But I can give her the next best thing.

Justice.

—

WHILE I HAD been plotting my revenge against Yorkey during my six months in jail, he had been busy, too. He’d allied himself with a group of bikers called the Pagans. They were hulking thugs who were, I assumed, somehow involved with meth, like him. And they were more than delighted to have his back, if it meant they could take down the leader of the Hartford NADS. Street cred like that went a long way.

I spent my first day out of jail trying to round up the old members of my crew, but they all knew what was about to go down, and they all had an excuse. “I gave up everything for you,” I said, when I had exhausted even the freshest cut in the squad. “And this is how you repay me?”

But the last thing I was going to do was let anyone think going to jail had dulled my edges. So that night, I went to the pizza place that used to be the unofficial headquarters of my crew, and waited until I heard the growl of a dozen bikes pull up. I threw down my jacket, cracked my knuckles, and walked out to the alley behind the restaurant.

Yorkey, the son of a bitch, was hiding behind a wall of muscle. Seriously, the smallest Pagan was about six-five and three hundred pounds.

I may have been smaller, but I was fast. And none of those guys had grown up ducking from my grandfather’s fists.

I wish I could tell you what happened that night, but all I have to go on is what I’ve heard from others. How I ran like a freaking berserker at the biggest guy, and revved up my arm so that my punch caught him square in the mouth and knocked out his entire front row of teeth. How I lifted one dude off his feet and sent him like a cannonball into the others. How I kicked a biker so hard in his kidney he allegedly pissed red for a month. How blood ran in the alley like rain on pavement.

All I know is I had nothing left to lose but my reputation, and that’s enough ammunition to power a war. I don’t remember any of it, except waking up the next morning in the pizza joint, with a bag of ice on my broken hand and one eye swollen shut.

I don’t remember any of it, but word spread. I don’t remember any of it, but once again, I was the stuff of legend.

—

ON THE DAY I bury my son, the sun is shining. The wind’s coming from the west, and it has teeth. I stand in front of the tiny hole in the ground.

I don’t know who organized this whole funeral. Someone had to call to get a plot, to let people know there would be a service. I assume it was Francis, who now stands at the front of the casket, reading a verse from Scripture: “?‘For this child I prayed, and the Lord hath given me my petition which I asked of him,’?” Francis recites. “?‘Therefore also I have lent him to the Lord; as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the Lord. And he worshiped the Lord there.’?”

There are guys from the drywall crew here, and some of Brit’s friends in the Movement. But there are also people I don’t know, who have come to pay their respects to Francis. One of them is Tom Metzger, the man who founded the White Aryan Resistance. He’s seventy-eight now, a loner like Francis.

When Brit starts sobbing during the reading of the psalm, I reach out to her, but she pulls away. Instead, she turns to Metzger, who she called Uncle Tommy when she was growing up. He puts an arm around her, and I try not to feel the absence of her as a slap.