The hour Victoria had asked for stretched longer than sixty minutes.

Elena stayed on the edge of the bed with Marcus’s hand on the back of her neck and the thick, warm evidence of him still inside her. Neither of them spoke much. The silence downstairs and the silence upstairs pressed in from both directions until the room felt smaller than it was. Every few minutes Elena’s mind snagged on a different piece of the damage—the bag in Victoria’s hand, the tracking notes lit up on the phone screen, the way her mother had looked at the bruises without flinching, the single word yes, the fact that Marcus had said...