The safehouse’s matriarch, Lucy, moved through the tension like a cool breeze on a hot night. She had arrived with Jerry hours ago, a welcome anchor in the churning storm. Her first move had been to check on Pat. She’d found the woman pale and bandaged, and had approached her not with suspicion, but with a quiet kindness that was both unexpected and disarming.
“You’re Pat,” Lucy had said, not as a question, but as a statement of fact. “Capol told me. Said you were… family.” Her eyes, though gentle, held a piercing gaze that Pat could not meet. It was a look that saw through every lie and every pretense, a look that spoke volumes of a woman who had lived with the consequences of her husband’s world for a long, long time.
Pat just nodded, her throat too tight for words. She expected resent
