He turned back to the road. "You're out of it now." "I'm outside the walls," she said. "That's not the same thing as free. Not yet."
Reverend Holt's church sat at the north end of Coldwater Creek's main street. A modest white building with a small attached house where Holt lived alone. He was 60 years old, thin and deliberate in his movements, with the kind of face that had once been openly warm and had developed, over years of navigating a complicated town, a more careful arrangement. He answered the door at Sam's knock, took in the two of them and Lily with a single sweep of his eyes, and his expression did the thing that Wade had trained it to do. A small preemptive tightening, a readying for a version of events he'd already been given.
"Mrs. Briggs," he said. His voice was careful. "I'm glad to see you're safe. Wade has been very "I need 10 minutes, Reverend," Martha said. "That's all.
10 minutes and then you can tell me I'm wrong if you believe I am." He looked at her. He looked at Sam. He looked at Lily, who was looking back at him with those enormous, serious, blue eyes, one fist buried in the fabric of her mother's coat. Whatever Joseph Holt was, he was not a man who could look at a 3-year-old's face and close a door.
"Come in," he said. They sat in the small front room of the house, Holt across from Martha. Sam on the chair by the wall. Lily pressed against her mother's side. Martha did not ease into it, or preface it, or apologize for it.
She put her hands on the table between them, both of them, and unwound the bandages with steady, deliberate fingers, and laid her wrists open to the light. Holt looked at them. A long, still, absolute look. His face did something complicated. "Rope burns," Martha said.
"From being tied to a fence post on Mr. Cole's property line two mornings ago. My coat had been taken. My daughter was barefoot. The temperature was four degrees. She wound the bandages back without looking away from him.
Harold Briggs told you I was troubled. That I had episodes. That he worried about my stability." Her voice was steady and quiet, and utterly without accusation. "He told you that because a man who was doing what Harold did in that house needs everyone around him to have a reason to discount his wife if she ever speaks.
He was building his defense years before he ever needed it." She paused. "Wade learned from Harold. He's using the same tools." Holt was quiet for a long time.