The engagement ring took some getting used to — a small, strange weight on her finger that Wren caught herself checking a dozen times a day, half-convinced she'd dreamed the whole porch-light proposal into being. But the ring was real, and so, unfortunately, was the mountain of legal and logistical fallout still crashing down around Ashford Hollow three weeks after Vance's arrest.
"Federal prosecutor's office called again," Desmond said, spreading a fresh stack of documents across the compound's long communal table, where he'd more or less installed himself in the weeks since the story broke, working out of a laptop and a growing folder of correspondence that seemed to multiply daily. "They want Dutch's formal deposition finalized by the fifteenth. And they want you too, Wren — not as a s
