Chapter 19: The Terms

"Which one of us?" I said.

Torvald opened his car door.

"Good night, Ms. Odegaard," he said. "Lock your doors. Not that it helped last time."

He drove away slowly.

I stood under the streetlight with my keys cutting into my palm.

Then I did what I'd screamed at Vidar for not doing.

I called him and told him what Torvald had said, before I could talk myself out of it.

There was a silence on the line so total I thought I'd lost him.

"Are you safe?"

"I'm going home. Come at noon tomorrow. Front door. We're going to talk."

"I'll be there."

"And Vidar? Don't send anybody to sleep in my yard."

Another silence.

"There's already somebody in your yard," he said. "She's black and white and she won't listen to me."

I looked across the lot.

Tove's wolf was lying under the fire hall's back steps with her chin on her paws.

She thumped her tail once on the gravel.

At noon he knocked on my front door.

He'd brought no flowers and no speech.

He stood on my mother's porch in his gray shirt and waited to be let in like a stranger.

I let him in.

I sat him at the kitchen table where Arne had sat, and I stayed standing.

"Three terms," I said. "You don't get to bargain them."

"Tell me."

"No secrets. Not big ones, not little ones you think are for my own good."

"Yes."

"No deciding alone. Not about me, not about you, not about the moon. We decide it at this table or we don't decide it."

"Yes."

"And when I ask you a question, you answer it. Even when the answer makes me leave."

He looked up at me.

"Yes," he said.

"Good." I folded my arms. "Take off your shirt."

He blinked.

"Not like that," I said. "Show me where it is now."

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