Chapter 199

Liam

They came in over three days, and every one of those days, Kade stood at the gate.

He didn’t have to. Ryan had men on the gate. There was a list in the hall downstairs with every name on it, and who was coming in person and who was sending someone, and which rooms they would have, and Hester had made it out in her neat square hand and pinned it to the board by the kitchen door. Kade knew all of it. He went and stood at the gate anyway, in the cold, with his hands in his coat pockets and his collar turned up over the black threads at his throat, and watched every car come up the lake road and turn in.

I stood with him when I could. He didn’t talk. Once, on the second afternoon, when a long gray car with Highmoor plates came round the last bend, he said, “Twenty-one,” very quietly, to nobody, and I knew he wasn’t counting cars.

Twenty days to the moon.

By Wednesday night we had all of them but one. Some had come themselves. Corran of Millford,