Heaven Should Fall

loyal to you, then God help me, Cade. Nothing would make you believe it.”

He broke eye contact grudgingly and looked toward the hallway again. Light splintered down in a broken pattern against the stairs, like kindling for a fire. “You know what, Jill—” he began, and the quaver in his voice was strange. “My old girlfriend, Piper…I almost slept with her about a week ago. I ran into her and it almost happened. Wait, no. That’s not the whole story.” He faced me, his eyes freakishly bright. I realized with astonishment that they were wet, almost overflowing with tears. “I was trying to find her. I couldn’t, though. And then I just stumbled into her, and one thing led to another, and I kissed her.”

I had no idea what to say. This was a fresh affront, this knowledge that I had stood through all of this beside a man who was chasing his ex-girlfriend in his spare time. I gave a short, sharp bark of a laugh and said, “That’s not cool.”

“I know. I stopped. I felt terrible. I’m such a piece of shit, babe. I’m going down so hard. I swear to God I thought I was going to die yesterday, once I walked into the office building with the stuff in my bag. I never planned to walk back out, no matter what Dodge thought. ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed —’”

Impatience and boredom filled my voice. “‘With the blood of patriots and tyrants.’”

“Right, yeah. And now what am I supposed to do? Go to jail? What the fuck would I do in jail?” His voice was rising. “I’m too goddamn smart to be in jail.”

“I don’t have any idea what you’ll do,” I snapped. “I guess you should have thought about that several months ago.”

He leaned against the door frame, his head against the darkly stained trim, weary. His gaze caught the middle distance. “This is all Dodge’s baby,” he said. “He’s the one who knows. The man with the plan.”

“Dodge is a first-class moron. And you’ve always thought so. Do the right thing, Cade,” I pleaded. “If you love us, find a way to get us out of here.”

His phone rang, and he scrambled to answer it. “Yes,” he said as he hurried out of the room, skipping down the stairs toward Dodge. “This is Cade Olmstead.”

I sat down hard on the mattress and turned TJ around in my lap so his face pressed against my chest. He gnawed his fist, still so hungry, and submitted to my desperate cuddling with placid ease. I breathed shallowly, straining to hear his father’s words from far away. When I failed, I rested my cheek against his small downy head and, with dense, choking sobs, cried.

* * *

“There’s no reason for me to do that if you’re not going to let him get to the hospital anyway,” Cade was saying into his phone. I had strapped TJ against my hip in the baby sling and cautiously ventured downstairs. Despite all of Dodge’s warnings, an hour had passed and nothing had happened yet; it seemed harder to believe we were in imminent danger of a SWAT team invasion. “You’re not following what I’m saying here. He’s got surgery at eight a.m. My wife’s not involved in this. She just wants to take him down to the hospital in Laconia and get it done.”

He saw me standing at the door of the pantry and waved me away, but I only moved a single step back. The last of my loyalty to him had melted away with his confession, and even in the midst of far greater concerns I seethed from the insult of it. From the corner between the cellar door and the kitchen, Dodge stood watching the local news on the living-room television, using the remote to switch between channels. Of course our house was the central image on every station, either a straight-on shot from the road or an aerial from the helicopter I had been hearing overhead. The memory of my mother’s plane on the red desert floor unfolded itself in my mind, and a shudder flickered down my spine as I wrapped a protective arm around TJ. Our story wasn’t going to end the way hers had. It couldn’t. I was here and aware, moving about that house on the screen, and I wouldn’t let that happen.

“Well, just move your damned vans for half a second,” Cade said. “Or have somebody take her down there, even. When you say ‘I’m sorry, that’s not possible,’ you know how that sounds to me? Because it’s really the only thing I want to talk to you about.”

There was a long silence, and then Cade rolled his eyes. “Fine, never mind, then,” he said, his voice taking on a sarcastic, bitchy edge. “Then how about you call me back when you actually want to negotiate instead of just try to fuck with me? Because that’s not going to go real well.”

He clicked off the phone. “Did you really just hang up on them?” I asked. “You can’t do that. You have to talk. TJ and I need to leave.”

“They’ll let you leave. They just won’t let him get his surgery.”

“Well, fine, then. Just let us walk out and we’ll worry about that later.”

Cade laughed as if I’d made a joke. “Yeah, right. Then what incentive would they have not to break down the door and take me with them? We’re a family. Nobody’s leaving. If he can’t get the surgery there’s no point anyway.”

I looked incredulously at Cade, then at Dodge, who had eased himself down onto the sofa with one arm behind his head and his gun resting on his belly like a bag of chips, eyes still fixed on the TV. “You can’t hold us hostage, Cade.”

“I’m not holding you hostage. We’re married. We’re sticking together, that’s all. Like always.”

He raised his eyebrows in an imploring way, a puppy-dog look, but distraction shifted his gaze to the television. His phone buzzed again, but rested ignored against his hip as he watched the live helicopter shots. Its incessant vibration stirred a memory of one of our first nights together, when he kissed me with escalating passion against a shadowed stadium wall after a football game, his BlackBerry vibrating against my thigh the entire time. Once upon a time I had wished the damn thing would go silent just for a little while. Now I desperately hoped he would answer it.

“I’m getting impatient with all their back-and-forth chitter-chattering,” Dodge said in response to the sound. “Shit or get off the pot, that’s what I say. One of us ought to go out there and stir something up. Give ’em some real incentive.”

“Shut up, Dodge,” Cade said, but he sounded listless this time. From the cellar, I heard Candy’s syrupy voice speaking, smooth and level. Drew was moaning. I cast a long, measuring look on Cade, then bolted across the living room to the door.

“Stop her!” Dodge barked, but he was already up and grabbing at me, his arm folding across my chest as I scrambled with the locks. TJ howled and gripped at my shirt. As Dodge dragged me backward I felt a small cold impact at the back of my head: his gun. I braced one arm around TJ and clawed at Dodge’s arm with the other, twisting and struggling, too overwhelmed by purpose to feel afraid. The arm only tightened, and TJ squalled with fury.

“Sweet Jesus,” Cade said. Dodge’s balance swerved, and the feeling of the hard steel went away. Cade’s voice ramped up louder, tense as the springs of a trap. “Christ, let her go already.”

“Take her back upstairs.”

He released me roughly, and I pulled TJ against my chest to try to calm him. He screamed to the end of the air in his lungs, his round face inflamed with rage. “Give me the baby,” said Cade. His voice was conciliatory.

“Not on your life.”

“C’mon, Jill. Let me talk to them some more before you go running out there and get you and TJ shot up. It isn’t going to be much longer.”

I looked past him to Dodge, who met my gaze with a pointed glare. He slid his gun back into his shoulder holster, slowly. Cade prodded my waist, and I tramped back up the stairs.

Back in the attic room, Candy’s boys were still riveted on the laptop screen. The devil’s third eye, Dodge always called it. I took it back from Matthew and tried to set up the network connection again, but it wouldn’t work. “Damn it,” I muttered.

“Aunt Jilly said a bad word,” intoned Mark.

I set the laptop back in their eager hands and gnawed my nails, gazing out the window at the trucks that seemed to have doubled in number. The broken thunder of the news helicopter vibrated the glass. My hands shook, and the memory of Dodge’s gun planted behind my ear loomed so large in

my mind that all my strategic thoughts of escape seemed to have shriveled. That was the goal, I supposed— to intimidate me into obedience, to keep me quiet and scared. As I sat against the wall and pulled TJ against me to