Chapter 11: Mill Town

Dottie's cast was purple, and she wanted everyone in the hospital to sign it.

"It's a greenstick fracture," she told me, gravely, from the bed.

"What's that?"

"It means my bone bent instead of breaking. Like a tree."

"That's very lucky."

"It's very painful," she said. "But I didn't cry. I fell off the monkey bars at recess and I didn't even cry. Ask Rhett."

Rhett stood against the wall, arms crossed, his face still gray.

"She cried," he said.

"I did not."

"She cried, and then she told the nurse she'd sue."

"I said I'd sue the monkey bars."

I laughed so hard I had to sit down.

Dottie was nine years old, with dark braids and gray eyes, and a gap where her front teeth were coming in.

She looked at my face for a long moment, very serious.

"You're Melina," she said. "The stat girl."

"I am."

"Rhett says you do all the numbers for the team. He says you're smarter than the coach."

"He said that?"

"He says it when he thinks I'm asleep."

Rhett made a strangled noise, and Dottie beamed.

It had taken two hours in a rental car Hallie booked to get to Harlan Falls, a gray mill town on a gray river.

Coach had shaken his hand and told him to go, and told me to go with him, and I had not asked why.

Their mother came in at four, after her shift at the care home.

She was small and tired, with a cane hooked over her arm and a bad hip she never mentioned.

She took Rhett's face in both hands and looked at it, the bandage, the bruises, all of it.

"You're hurt," she said.

"It's a cut."

"It's always a cut."

She turned to me, and her eyes were the same smoke gray as his.

"You're the one he doesn't talk about," she said.

My stomach dropped.

"Mom," Rhett said.

"Well, he doesn't." She looked at me with a faint smile. "Which tells me everything."

The apartment was on the third floor of a brick building with a broken buzzer.

It had two bedrooms, a kitchen the size of a closet, and a radiator that clanked.

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