"You have to leave," she said. "All of you."
Chapter 2
Darren
Mason didn't move fast. That was the first rule with a frightened child, and it was the same rule as with a frightened animal: no sudden moves, no looming, no grabbing. He stayed in the booth. He kept his hands where she could see them. He let his voice drop into the register he used with nervous horses and new riders and anybody else who needed the world to get quieter for a minute.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said. "And neither are you, unless you want to. Sit down? There's a whole bench here, and I promise it doesn't bite."
She didn't sit. But she didn't run, either. She stayed where she was, pressed against the edge of the booth like the booth itself might protect her, and watched him the way a person watches a door they're not sure is locked.
"What's your name, sweetheart?" he asked again, softer.
"Lily."
"Lily. That's a good name. I'm Mason. Do you want some water, Lily?"
She nodded, just barely. Mason caught the waitress's eye and held up two fingers, and a glass of water appeared on the table as if by magic. Millie Carson herself brought it — sixty-eight years old, sturdy as a fence post, forty years of throwing drunks out of her restaurant — and she set it down without a word and without looking at the girl too hard, the way a woman looks at a stray that might bolt.
Lily drank half the glass in three gulps. Then she set it down and stared at her own hands.
"You want something to eat?" Mason asked. "Millie's pie is famous. The banana cream, especially — Caleb says it's a health food, but I wouldn't go that far."
The ghost of a smile crossed her face. It was there and gone in a second, but Mason caught it, and it steadied him somehow. She was still in there, this kid. Still herself, under all the fear.
"Darren says Mama's stories are lies," she said, very quietly. "He says there's no Wolf. He says nobody's coming."
Mason looked at her — really looked at her, the muddy sneakers and the torn shirt and the brave, exhausted eyes — and he said, "Well. He was wrong about that."
Behind him, Caleb had gone silent for once in his life. He sat with his fork halfway to his mouth, staring at his plate like it had done something to offend him. Nadine put a hand on his arm, gentle and firm, the way you'd settle a dog that wanted to chase something it shouldn't.
"Lily," Mason said, "you said I have to leave. Can you tell me why?"
She was quiet for a long time. The diner went on around them — plates clinking, Caleb arguing with somebody about whether banana cream pie counted as a vegetable now — but in the window booth, the world had narrowed to a little girl and a man trying very hard not to scare her.
"Darren gets mad," she said at last.
"Darren." Mason kept his voice level. "Who's Darren?"
"He..." She swallowed. "He lives with us. With me and Mama. He says I'm not supposed to talk to anybody. He says if I tell, he'll —" She stopped. Her eyes went to the window again, to the road. "He'll get mad."
Mason had heard that sentence before, in different mouths, in different years. He had heard it from women in parking lots and from kids at charity events and from men who were too ashamed to finish it. He knew what it meant. It meant fear had a name and an address, and somebody small was living in the same house as it.
"Do you want to live with Darren?" he asked.
She shook her head. Hard. "No."
"Okay," Mason said. "That's all I needed to hear."
Behind him, Nadine Brooks had gone very quiet. Nadine was sixty-something, silver braid down her back, Mason's right hand in the club for a decade — warm as a summer kitchen and sharp as a tack, and right now she was watching the room the way Mason watched the road: everything at once, nothing missed. She caught his eye and gave the smallest nod in the world, and then she turned to the rest of the riders and said, in a voice like a mother calling kids in from the yard, "Everybody stay in your seats and finish your pie. Nobody's going anywhere."
Caleb stopped mid-sentence. The pie argument died on the spot. Twenty-two bikers in leather vests sat very still and looked at anything that wasn't the window booth.
Millie was already behind the counter with the phone in her hand. She didn't ask permission. She didn't make a show of it. She just dialed, the way she'd done a hundred times before for a hundred smaller reasons, and said, "Elena? It's Millie. I need you at the diner. There's a little girl here, and it's not nothing.
Mason heard Millie's voice drop lower, the way it did when she was talking about something real. "She's nine, maybe. Scared half to death. And Elena — there's a man involved. I want you here before he finds her." She listened, nodded once, and hung up. Then she poured a fresh pot of coffee like nothing had happened, because that was Millie's way: handle the crisis, then pour the coffee."