The yard was already stirring by the time Rick crossed it, but the stirring went quiet in patches as he passed. A woman folding blankets by the fence line stopped mid-fold and watched him go. T-Dog and Hershel exchanged a knowing look and said nothing at all. Word travels fast in a place this size no matter how hard you try to bottle it, and Glenn's reminder to Rick that earlier hadn't stopped a single person from noticing that something had changed overnight.
Especially if the guards watching the holding cells couldn't keep their mouths shut.
Rick kept his eyes forward. His jaw was set in that flat, unreadable way Glenn had only seen a handful of times before — usually right before something bad happened, or right after.
"You want me to wait outside?" Glenn asked, falling half a step behind as they neared Cell Block C.
"No." Rick's voice was clipped. "I want you there. I don't trust myself that I won't do anything."
Glenn didn't argue. He just nodded and quickened his pace to match.
They passed Carol near the water station, and she opened her mouth like she might ask what was wrong, then thought better of it when she saw Rick's face. A couple of the kids playing near the garden bed paused their game to watch the two men walk by with a kind of instinctive hush, the way children do when they sense weather changing before the adults say a word about it.
By the time they reached the cell block door, half the yard had gone quiet behind them. Inside the concrete held the cold of the night in its bones, and neither man in the neighboring cells had slept.
Shane lay on his back with one arm slung over his eyes, not from tiredness but because it was easier than staring at the ceiling. Somewhere past the wall, Baldwin had gone quiet for the better part of an hour — must have gotten bored, Shane guessed.
"You are still troubled," Baldwin said eventually, and it wasn't a question this time.
"Wouldn't you be?"
A pause. "I have made peace with worse mornings than this."
"Good for you."
Shane heard the creak of the cot on the other side of the wall as Baldwin shifted. "For what it is worth, deputy — whatever waits for you beyond that door, it will not be improved by dread. Dread only softens a man before the blow lands. Better to meet it standing."
Shane almost laughed. "You really talk like this all the time, huh."
"Only when I mean it."
He was about to fire back something when he heard it — footsteps, more than one set, coming down the corridor at a pace that wasn't casual and wasn't hurried either. Just steady. Deliberate.
Shane sat up slowly, and something in his chest went cold and still, the way it used to right before he stepped into a room he already knew had a body in it. He knew that walk. He'd know it anywhere.
Rick.
He didn't call out. He just sat there on the edge of the cot with his hands loosely clasped between his knees, listening to the footsteps grow louder, and beside him — through eight inches of cinderblock — he heard Baldwin go still too, the way a man goes still when he recognizes that something is happening that isn't his to interrupt.
The footsteps stopped outside the door.
For a long moment, nobody said anything at all. Shane took a breath and slowly opened his eyes. He turned around to look and saw Rick standing in front of his cell, lit from behind by the gray morning coming through windows. Glenn's shadow hovered a step back and to the side.
"Rick." Shane said it plain, no smirk, no bravado. Just his name.
Rick didn't answer right away. His eyes moved over Shane's face like he was looking for something — checking, maybe, whether the man in front of him still resembled the person he used to trust with his life, or whether that person had been gone a lot longer than anyone had let themselves admit.
"Glenn told me," Rick said finally. His voice was even. Too even. "Everything."
Shane held his gaze and didn't look away, and also did not say anything.
"You got one thick skin showing up here after what you did. Though I'm surprised Michael did not rough you up last night." Rick stopped himself, jaw working, and took a slow breath through his nose before he continued. "You really came here just to find out if the baby's yours?"
"Yeah."
"That's it? Just — yeah?"
"What do you want me to say, Rick? You want me to dress it up? I came here because I had to know. That's the whole damn truth of it. I already told everything last night, and half of the people here probably know I'm here. So I'm actually surprised that Lori hasn't shown up yet."
"She's sleeping." Glenn remarked from the side.
Rick's hand tightened on the door frame. Behind him, Glenn shifted his weight, ready to step in if things went sideways, though nobody quite knew yet in which direction sideways would go.
"You don't get to just show up," Rick said, quieter now, and somehow that was worse than if he'd shouted. "You don't get to vanish on us, throw your lot in with people who tried to hurt us, and then walk back through our gate like you've got some kind of claim."
"I never said I had a claim."
"Didn't you?"
Shane's throat worked. For once, he didn't have a smart answer ready. "I said I needed to know. That's different from a claim, and you know it."
Rick studied him a moment longer, and something in his expression shifted — not softened, exactly, but settled, like a decision he'd already half-made overnight had finally finished arriving.
"You'll never see Lori," he said. "Not today. Maybe not ever, I don't know, that's between her and whatever she decides. But you don't get to demand that either."
"I'm not demanding anything. I just want to see her and hear it directly from her rather than from someone else." Shane showed frustration, and the annoyance in his voice became evident.
"We'll see, but for now, you're staying right where you are until this camp decides what happens next, and that decision isn't only mine to make anymore." Rick's eyes flicked, briefly, toward the wall separating Shane's cell from Baldwin's, like he'd only just registered there was somebody listening on the other side. "Both of you."
He turned around and started walking away without waiting for a response, and his footsteps grew fainter as he walked away.
Glenn looked at Shane and shook his head before leaving.
Shane sat there in the sudden quiet, staring into space, his emotions still not fully settled. A moment later, Baldwin's voice came softly through the wall, without a trace of his earlier theatrics. "That did not go as poorly as it might have."
"Man." Shane let his head fall back against the cinderblock with a dull thud. "Don't you ever stop?"
"Rarely."
"Well, shut up."