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When she looked up at him, Savich said, “He shot Katie.”

“What? How? But that isn’t possible! She never said a word, she never acted wounded, she—”

Savich leaned his head back against one of the cabinets, closed his eyes. “He shot her in the hip and she managed to hide it from all of us. The bullet went in and through. She’ll be okay. Miles called from the emergency room while the nurse was getting Katie into a robe. Turns out she didn’t say a word about it until after they’d gotten home and put the kids to bed. Then she tells him. He’s still so shaken up he could barely speak straight.”

“She’s really okay?”

“Yes, soon to be out with a smile on her face from the morphine. Just a couple days rest, and she’ll be fine.”

Sherlock picked up a hot pad and hurled it across the kitchen. It calmed her and didn’t make any noise to frighten Sean. “I don’t believe this, Dillon. It’s ridiculous, just plain dumb. She’s wounded and doesn’t even let on? No, that can’t be right, it can’t.”

“She didn’t say anything because she didn’t want the kids any more frightened than they were. If you think about it, you can see Katie’s point. It was an adult decision, hers to make, I guess.”

Sherlock’s heart was still pumping wildly. She threw another hot pad at the wall, calmed herself down. “It was brave of her.” She drew in a deep breath. “I hope I would have the presence of mind to do that. But wait, Dillon, if the shooter hit her—”

“That means I wasn’t the target. Or, I really was the target, and he could have shot at her first, for the fun of it.”

Savich straightened, shrugged. “Maybe he, whoever he is, just wanted to scare us. At this point, any guess is as good as any other. Who knows, it might have been a random shooting.” Neither of them believed that for an instant.

Savich picked up Sean, who was tightly clutching his orange ball, and walked to the front window in the living room. He stared out into the calm dark night. A storm was expected to hit Monday, winter coming with a grand announcement. And the temperature would plummet. Sean dropped his ball, watched it roll under an end table. He then spoke in his father’s ear and patted his face, telling him things he understood, like good spaghetti—“I think Sean just said he wanted a puppy.”

It was so ridiculous that for a moment Sherlock actually laughed and kissed her son’s sleepy face.

She saw the strain on Dillon’s face, saw the restless movement of his hands, saw the scars on his hands and fingers from his whittling. She knew he’d been caught off guard by the same devastating feelings she had felt when that bullet had come so close to him and to Sean. It made her want to scream and cry at the same time. He said finally, as if he’d been holding the words inside but they now had to come out, “This was too close, Sherlock, far too close. Sean could have been killed.”

Of course she agreed. The corrosive fear, the sense of absolute impotence—she nodded but didn’t say anything, just moved closer.

Sean’s head now lay on his father’s shoulder. Savich lightly smoothed his back, cupped his head. She saw a spasm of fear cross his face. He said quietly, “I’ve been giving a lot of thought today to what I’ve been doing nearly all my adult life—being a cop. What if . . . what if, because of me, some crazy kills my son? It would be my fault, Sherlock, no one else’s, just mine, and it would all be because of what I choose to do for a living. I couldn’t live with that, I just couldn’t.”

“No,” she said slowly, her eyes still on his face, “neither of us could.”

He plowed forward, the words forcing themselves out of his mouth. “Maybe, just maybe, I should think about another line of work.” There, he’d said the unimaginable, and the earth hadn’t opened up and swallowed him. It was out in the open now, those words between them, and he didn’t say anything else, just let the unthinkable settle around him, and he waited. Sean suddenly lurched up against his palm, and smiled at his father. He patted his father’s face again with wet fingers.

Sherlock closed in and put her arms around him, just as