Chapter 13: Twelve Years of Rent

Wyatt's POV

Nobody stopped me when I walked out of the supper.

Sixty people watched me go down the terrace steps, and not one of them said my name.

Marisol didn't say it either.

She stood at the head of the table with her cracked phone in her hand and let me go.

In the cottage I took the glass jar down from the shelf above my mother's photograph.

Twelve dollar bills and twelve receipts, each one signed L. Ashbury, received with thanks.

For twelve years I had thought of those receipts as proof that I paid my own way.

I tore them in half, then in quarters, and put the pieces in my jacket pocket.

I left the dollars in the jar and drove out at two in the morning, because I had nowhere else to put what I knew.

The road to Fresno runs south through the dark valley and then flat for two hours between orchards.

I had driven it once before, with a leather folder on the passenger seat and Lillian in the back.

I got to the Quintero gate as the sky went gray.

It was the same gate as the photograph on the screen at the gala, with the same arch of iron letters over the road.

Joaquin's truck was already parked in the yard, and Joaquin sat on the porch steps with a mug in his hand.

He had driven straight from the supper.

He watched me get out of my truck, and he set the mug down carefully on the step.

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