Thirty weeks. The point where your body stops being a vessel and starts being a hostage situation — the baby has demands, your organs are negotiating for space, and your bladder has surrendered unconditionally.
Blood pressure: 142 over 94. Dr. Chen wrote it down with the penmanship of a woman who wanted the number legible for future reference. Took it twice, then witched arms. Third reading: 140 over 92 — the medical equivalent of a fire alarm lowering volume by one decibel and expecting reassurance.
"You need to reduce stress."
I almost laughed. The laugh formed around my diaphragm, made it halfway up, and was intercepted by the part of my brain that understood laughing at your obstetrician while your blood pressure threatens its own zip code is not controlled behavior.
So I nodded. The way you nod when someone says relax during a hurricane — technically sound, practically useless.
She used the word preeclampsia the way a weatherwoman uses hurricane — not a diagnosis, a warning. A system forming offshore that might make landfall. Board up the windows regardless.
I drove home with my hand on my belly and my blood pressure in my head and the specific fury of a woman whose body was now adding itself to the list of things trying to fail on her.
Four months of external crises — the town, the money, the McKennas — and now my own blood had decided to join the opposition. Traitor.
Colt kept his word.
Every account, every shortfall laid out on the kitchen table like surgical instruments. He walked me through each one with the careful transparency of a man performing penance through financial disclosure.
Uncomfortable — I could see it in his hands hovering over the laptop, the instinct to turn the screen away still alive in his muscle memory.
Operating costs, the gap, Hank's medication schedule. Insurance shortfall. The Meridian buyer's contract, smaller than Driscoll's but clean — no McKenna fingerprints.
"This is what we have, what we need. The difference is here."
I looked at the gap. Smaller than feared, larger than hoped — the mathematical reality of every crisis for five months. Never catastrophic enough for the three a.m. version, never manageable enough for the daylight version. Living in the exhausting middle where survival is possible and comfort is fiction.
Kameron entered Brownwood. Third event back. Came home with third place. Smaller purse. Frustration across his face like weather across a plains sky — visible from a distance, carrying the specific energy of a competitive man who'd aimed for first and landed somewhere that tasted like failure even though it wasn't.
I iced his shoulder in the kitchen. He sat on the counter — too tall for chairs — wincing when cold hit the joint he'd been favoring since Waco.
"Third place." Disgusted. The word pronounced the way other people say last.
"Third place still pays the electric bill."
He opened his mouth to argue, then grinned. The real one. "That's a terrible motivational poster."
"I'll cross-stitch it for you."
"Please don't."
Javier's contact came through. Henderson, Waco — independent, no McKenna affiliations. Smaller contract, tight margins. But it covered operating costs. Barely. The financial equivalent of treading water — not drowning, not swimming, just mouth above the surface.
Ryan came by Saturday. Off-duty, in his truck, wearing the expression of a man who'd been doing something unofficial and found something he wished he hadn't.
Quiet research on the McKennas. Calls to contacts in Fort Worth. Public records. The kind of careful, unofficial investigation a sheriff conducts when he can't open a case but can't sleep without knowing the shape of what's coming for his sister.
"Gerald's pressure is legal," he said, sitting at the kitchen table that had become our war room, our confessional, the surface that absorbed more crisis per square foot than any piece of furniture had a right to.
"Every move — the buyer, the financial pressure, the information gathering — within legal bounds. Just barely. The man operates exactly at the line, which tells me he has lawyers who drew it for him."
"So nothing you can do."
"Nothing official. But power like Gerald's only works if you're dependent on what he controls. The buyer was leverage — you replaced it. The financial pressure — you're restructuring. Take away his leverage, take away the threat. He's not dangerous because he's powerful. He's dangerous because you needed things he could touch."
That evening coffee gone cold because nobody was drinking it — just something to hold while we discussed the man systematically dismantling our lives with the patience of someone who'd been winning for so long he'd forgotten losing was possible.
"My father is patient," Colt said. Staring at the dark with the focus of a man mapping a battlefield he couldn't see but knew by heart. "This won't end fast. He doesn't escalate — he persists. Finds the next pressure point, applies force until it gives, then the next. It's not anger driving him. It's strategy. And strategy doesn't get tired."
Kameron leaned back, boot propped on the railing. "What's the worst he can do? We replaced the buyer. We're covering costs. Ranch is standing. What's left?"
The question hung in cold January air — honest, practical, the question of a man who dealt in visible threats and tangible obstacles and hadn't yet learned that the worst damage is always the kind you don't see until it's already inside the walls.
My phone buzzed.
Unknown number.
‘Ms. Hill, this is Hamilton County Child Protective Services. We'd like to schedule a visit regarding your household. Please call our office at your earliest convenience.’
The coffee went cold in my hand. Or maybe it was already cold and I was just now feeling it — the temperature dropping in my fingers, in my chest, in the locked room behind my sternum where every fear I'd ever had about my children lived.
CPS. Child Protective Services. The three letters that every mother in a nontraditional household hears in nightmares — the institutional machinery that exists to protect children and can be weaponized to destroy families, depending entirely on who's filing the complaint and what they can afford to prove.
I read it twice, then looked up. Kameron and Colt still talking — mouths moving, words I couldn't hear, because sound had left the world the way it leaves a room after a blast, everything between the explosion and your eardrums turned to static.
What's the worst he can do? I turned the phone toward them. This is the worst he can do.