The Lost Women of Lost Lake by Ellen Hart

in really … taking care of him?”
    â€œI got the impression they thought it was either him or them.”
    â€œHell,” said Kenny, shoving the roach clip into the dirt. “Nobody’s gonna threaten my gran. I don’t care what she did.” Glancing at Jonah, he said, “Did you tell me what that was?”
    â€œA bombing.”
    â€œWell, hell. If shit happens, they had a reason.”
    Jonah hated to admit it, but he felt the same way. That’s why he’d hightailed it to the hideout. He pretty much anticipated what Kenny’s reaction would be. “So what do we do?”
    â€œFind the guy and send him back to where he came from.”
    â€œAnd if he won’t go?”
    Kenny smiled. “He’ll go. Or I’ll break every bone in his freakin’ body. You think I’m kidding?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œDamn straight.”
    They touched fists and went back to smoking their dope.

11
    Once upon a time, Tessa had fed off risk. It had been her drug of choice. She understood intimately the kind of pleasure—and pain—that came from knowing you were risking something important. And yet, during her time in the wilderness of northern Minnesota, she seemed to have lost her taste for it.
    It had bothered her at first, this lack of courage. It took her years to understand such a fundamental change in her nature. What she saw now, a truth that she’d been blind to as a younger woman, was that risk, the kind she relished, was bound to certainty; they were halves of the same coin.
    If you were, for example, engaged in fighting for a righteous cause, the cosmos, by its very nature, had to be on your side. Thus, while risk might exist, it was mitigated. In the end, if you failed, if you were caught, beat up, fired from a job, evicted from your apartment, jailed, if you lost your lover or even your family, you could still hold your head high because what you’d been working for was the cause of the Greater Good.
    What Tessa had lost wasn’t simply her love of risk, but her absolute belief that she had the keys to the kingdom of the Greater Good. Once lost, she doubted those keys could ever be recovered.
    Strange as it would have seemed to to her twenty-five-year-old self, her sixty-five-year-old self thought that lack of certainty was not only good but a huge step forward morally.
    A quiet life, a settled routine, a room of her own to work on her craft, the love of a good woman—those were what Tessa craved now. Perhaps it meant that she’d buried her head in the proverbial sand. What she also knew was that all human beings shoved their heads as far into the dark as they could just so they could continue to live and not go quietly insane. Everyone turned their backs on the horrors in the world, otherwise no one, with the exception of sociopaths and fanatics, would be able to sleep at night.
    From the very first, Tessa understood that Judy was the biggest threat to her continuing freedom. If it wasn’t for their shared goal of staying under the radar, they would have parted company long ago. They had nothing in common except for a single violent act, one they both regretted. Still, Tessa continued to keep her finger on Judy’s emotional pulse because she needed to know they were still on the same page. The problem at the moment was, she was no longer sure they were.
    Two years ago, when Judy met George Sunderland and found the Lord, a new element had been tossed into the mix. Tessa had never been religious herself, although she respected the spiritual instinct as universal. And yet, instead of adding an authentic sense of ethical and moral underpinnings to Judy’s internal life, Tessa felt a new slipperiness take hold. Now more than ever, Judy’s ideas and actions seemed inscrutable. After years of being philosophically to the left of the average anarchist, Judy’s values, such as they were, had turned murky. Tessa had no way