The Hallway

By the time I got through the front door my dad already had Junie in his arms, wrenched half out of Corinne's grip in the hallway, and Corinne was saying his name in that same warm, reasonable voice she'd used up the stairwell nine days ago — Graham, sweetheart, let me explain, you're scaring her, put her down, you're the one scaring her—

"I found the second ID," I said, loud, before I could talk myself out of it. "In your suitcase. There's a third name, Corinne. Or whoever you are."

Everything in that hallway stopped for a second, the way a held breath stops.

Her face didn't do what I expected. It didn't crumble, didn't panic. It went smooth and flat, like glass, like something that had rehearsed for exactly this moment more than once in its life and had decided, calmly, on a version of events.

"Give her to me," Corinne said. Not to my dad. To me. "Wynn. Give me my daughter."

"She's not going anywhere with you," my dad said, backing toward me, Junie's face buried wet and hot against his collar.

"You don't understand what happens now," Corinne said, and her voice had dropped the warmth entirely, gone flat and fast, the voice from the kitchen, the please doesn't fill a plate voice. "If they take her from me because of this, you understand that, don't you, both of you, you understand what you're doing—"

Outside, tires on gravel. Doors.

Corinne heard it too. I watched her hear it — watched the calculation move behind her eyes, weighing the front door against the back, weighing nine steps against however many seconds she had left as a free woman standing in her own front hallway.

She took a step toward the back of the house.

"Corinne." Detective Sorensen's voice, already inside, already between her and the kitchen, one hand loose and ready at her side. "Don't."

Corinne stopped in the middle of the hallway, exactly between all of us, exactly between every door in that house, and for one full second nobody in that hallway moved at all.