Chapter 24: Whose House Is This

"Yes," I said, in the jail parking lot, with my face against his shirt.

Ansel did not move.

"Yes?"

"Yes, I'll stay. Yes to the lake, and the shed, and you."

He laughed once, rough and short, and then he kissed me in front of two guards and a family in a minivan.

Someone in the minivan honked.

I kissed him anyway.

That was Thursday.

By Saturday, Dalton had signed his plea.

On Monday, the Reeve Harbor board confirmed a new chief executive, a woman who had run a port for twenty years.

I kept my father's seat on the board, and Ansel took the seat Dalton had pushed him out of.

The directors who had nodded along with Dalton for seven years looked at me across the glass table, and none of them looked away.

I did not make a speech.

I went home at four o'clock, because Poppy got out of school at three-thirty and she was waiting.

The lake house smelled of wood shavings and burnt toast.

Ansel stood at the stove in his flannel shirt, attacking a pan of something with a spatula.

"What is it?" I said.

"Dinner."

"Which part?"

"Pancakes. It's a theory."

Poppy sat at the table with her boots on the chair and the otter in her lap.

"They're not pancakes," she told me. "They're bad."

"They're delicious," Ansel said, without turning.

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