Chapter 5: The Road

He told me the gate was open at breakfast, and he said it again so I would stop waiting for the catch.

I sat at the long scarred table with a plate of eggs I wasn't eating.

Toby stood at the window with his coffee, not sitting.

The housekeeper had set no second plate at the far end that morning, and I noticed that the quiet in the room had a shape.

"The gate's open," he said.

"You told me," I said.

"I'm telling you again, because last night you stood at a door you thought was locked."

"I wasn't trying to leave."

"I know," Toby said. "Your tuition is paid. Your mother's rent is paid."

He set his mug on the windowsill.

"If you walk down that drive this morning and don't come back, nothing changes. Nobody follows you. Nobody tells Lars where you went."

"You'd lose your leverage," I said.

"I never had any."

He turned to face me.

"You're twenty-two," he said. "You're not a prisoner. I put you in this house because there was no other safe place to put you that night."

"And now?"

"There's still no safe place. But it's your choice every day, and I'll say so every day until you believe me."

I pushed the plate away.

"Say why," I said.

"You're not ready."

"You keep deciding that."

"I keep being right," Toby said.

I stood up so fast the chair scraped.

"Then I'll go."

"Go," he said.

His face did not change.

His hands did.

They closed at his sides, and I watched the knuckles go white.

I put on the parka and walked out the front door and down the porch steps and along the drive, and no one called after me.

The younger man with the chin scar stood at the corner of the house and looked at his boots.

The sun was barely up.

The drive was a mile of packed snow between black spruce, and the cold hurt my lungs.

I walked all of it with my hands in the parka's pockets and my jaw set, counting each hundred steps, and I did not look back.

The gate was iron, hung on a wooden post, and it stood wide open with the chain hanging loose.

Beyond it the county road was empty and plowed down to the gravel.

I stood on the shoulder.

A pickup crossed the far end of the road and its taillights went over the hill.

I could have flagged it.

I could have caught a ride into Two Harbors and been in my mother's kitchen in two hours.