"You're insane," he said, backing away, cradling his shoulder, even though nothing was actually damaged. Just startled. Just reminded of a vulnerability he'd never had to think about before. "You attacked me. Everybody saw it. You attacked me."
"You put your hands on a pregnant woman this morning," Ren said, calm as still water. "I put my hand on your wrist for 4 seconds. If you want to talk about what actually happened today, I'm happy to have that conversation with anybody who asks."
Grant didn't answer.
He turned and walked away fast, Chase and Dylan trailing after him, throwing uncertain glances back over their shoulders. Already, in some dim animal way, understanding that something had shifted today that none of them fully had words for yet.
Ren stood alone on the sidewalk outside the pharmacy, breathing evenly, hands loose at her sides. The trident charm settling back against her collarbone where it had shifted during the motion.
She had not enjoyed it. That was the truth she would have told anyone who asked, though nobody did. Not that day.
There was no satisfaction in it. Only relief. The particular relief of a held breath finally released. Of a principle finally allowed to do the one thing it existed for.
She had no idea, walking back toward the bakery, that Grant Colton was already on the phone with his father.
And she had no idea that, by that evening, it would be her own name, and not his, on a police report.
Walter Colton's version of the story, by the time it reached Chief Marcus Doyle's desk that afternoon, bore only a passing resemblance to what had happened on that sidewalk.
"My son was assaulted," Walter said, standing in the small police station with the particular stiffness of a man used to being listened to the moment he opened his mouth. "In broad daylight. Unprovoked. This woman attacked him, threw him to the ground, twisted his arm. He could have been seriously hurt."
Chief Doyle, a broad-shouldered man in his 50s with 26 years on the Cedar Hollow force, leaned back in his chair and studied Walter across the desk.
He'd heard a slightly different version already, from two separate witnesses who'd called in on their own, unprompted, describing an old man's cane knocked to the floor and a pregnant woman grabbed hard enough to nearly fall.
"Walter," Doyle said carefully, "I've got two other reports crossing my desk about your son this morning. One involves an elderly man on the bus. One involves a pregnant woman."
"That's a separate matter," Walter said quickly, waving a hand. "Kids being kids. A little roughhousing. Nothing that rises to what happened this afternoon. I want charges filed. Assault. My son has bruising on his shoulder to prove it."
Doyle rubbed his jaw. 26 years on this job had taught him to recognize the particular sound of a man trying to control a story before the story could control him.