Cam: [wipes eyes] Nothing could have prepared me for that kind of terror. Nothing.
Juanita: So what did you do?
Cam: I drove like hell. I prayed to a God I’ve spent most of my life either ignoring or mocking, a God I have zero business asking any favors. I swore that if He or She would just spare my family, just… [shakes head]
Juanita: Do you need to take a break?
Cam: No. I’m all right.
Juanita: Take all the time you need.
Cam: I swore if God would spare them, keep them alive and in one piece, then I would never ask for anything ever again. And all those things I used to care about, the restaurants and the real estate and the houses and cars, I’d give it all up. Because here’s what happens when your family’s lives are at stake. There’s this…white-light moment of clarity, a lightning-bolt realization that you’re an idiot and all that shit you’ve spent so much time and effort accumulating is worthless. The banks can have everything. I don’t want any of those things anymore. Without Jade and the Bees, it’s worthless. I’m worthless.
Juanita: August 6 was your wake-up call?
Cam: [nods] I’m just sorry it happened too late.
J A D E
6:57 p.m.
I’m so busy watching Sebastian that I don’t notice it at first.
The way Beatrix’s arm reached across the armrest and into my chair just now, like her wrist wasn’t connected to the leather. The object she pressed in my hand.
Long. Hard. Warm from body heat.
Automatically, I close my fingers around it, concealing the thing in a fist.
But I don’t look. And I don’t consider how it could be possible. Not yet.
I’m too distracted by Sebastian’s shouting into the wall speaker, a long tirade about how Cam better get here and get here in a hurry. How he shouldn’t listen to me.
Three minutes until seven, the blink of an eye and an endless eternity at the same time. Sebastian is furious, this situation so volatile. Anything can happen in three minutes.
And then realization hits.
The warm, hard, sticky thing in my palm.
I unfurl my fingers just enough to peek inside.
It’s Cam’s pocketknife, the one he’s had since college, a scratched and beat-up thing that once belonged to his grandfather. Cam keeps it more for sentimental value than for its usefulness, storing it under a stack of wrinkled business cards in an antique box in his study. As far as I know, he’s never showed it to the kids.
But Beatrix knew where to look.
Not only that.
In the middle of a life-or-death emergency, when she had only a few seconds to scout out a hiding place, Beatrix went for a weapon. She found the pocketknife in Cam’s hiding place. This is the reason we don’t have a gun.
My smart girl kept her wits about her. While the three of us were downstairs searching the basement, Beatrix was in Cam’s study, gathering weapons and making signs. She’s my four-foot, curly-haired, levelheaded hero.
I close my fingers around the knife and twist around on my chair.
Beatrix’s seat is empty. She stands in front of it, bare toes digging into the carpet. Her hands hang loose by her sides, free from their bindings.
Behind her, the duct tape lies wrinkled and deflated on the leather. Sawed completely through, four messy slices in the metallic silver, by the pocketknife in my hand. It must have taken her forever, and all that time I didn’t see. None of us heard a sound.
Especially not Sebastian, watching from the other side of the coffee table. He has both hands raised, fingers spread wide, palms pushing against the air. “Don’t even think about it.”
My gaze returns to Beatrix’s hands, but I only see one of them. Her left hand, hanging empty by her side. The other is concealed by her body.
And yet I already know what’s in it.
I see it from Sebastian’s suddenly blanched skin, the way his eyes go twitchy. I see it in the set of Beatrix’s mouth, her rod-straight back and trembling shoulders. From the way my mind stops screaming long enough to hear what’s happening outside, the soft but steady sound, whistling like a distant wind.
I know what’s in Beatrix’s hand long before she lifts her arms and I see the gun. She grips it in two white-knuckled hands.
And that whistling outside? It’s not wind.
It’s sirens.
Sebastian’s earlier words echo through my brain: At the first sign of sirens, the bullets start flying. First the kids, then you.
And now it’s Beatrix holding the gun, her finger curled around the trigger.
Sebastian doesn’t move.
The moment slips into crystalline focus.