Chapter 16: Her Father's Notebook

"I'm choosing neither," I said.

My mother stared at me.

"That isn't an option."

"It's the only one I have."

Nolan came up the porch steps and stopped beside me, near enough that his sleeve touched mine.

"Ma'am, you're on state land," he said. "This is a closed road. You have one minute to take your car off my gate."

"I'm her mother."

"Then you can call her when you're ready to say something true."

She took the torn pages from the lawyer, folded them once, and held them out to me.

I did not take them.

She dropped them in the snow and went to the car.

Danny watched her drive away, and then he bent, picked up the pages one by one, and put them in his coat pocket.

"For the sheriff," he said.

Nolan didn't ask what had been said.

His hand found the small of my back and stayed there, and I stood in the cold and let myself feel how much I wanted to turn my face into his neck.

I did not, because Danny was watching.

Danny noticed that too and looked pointedly at the sky.

Five days later I started work in Missoula.

The clinic was a bright office on the south side with a cheerful manager and two hygienists I liked at once.

I cleaned teeth for eight hours and talked about flossing, and nobody had a camera.

That was the whole first week, and it was the best week I had had in years.

Nolan had driven me over on Sunday with my one duffel and a box of kitchen things from the cabin.

He carried everything up three flights without a word.

At the apartment door he stood in the hallway holding the empty box.

"It's small," he said.

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