Chapter 5: Arizona

I didn't answer Mom that night.

I said I was tired, which was true, and went up the stairs on my hands and knees with my legs under one arm.

Nobody offered to walk me.

I lay awake until three doing math.

Arizona was eighteen hundred miles from the Lake Street stairs.

A private cottage with a locked gate was the easiest place in the world to lose somebody.

Double, Nessa had said.

Thirty thousand a month to put me back on a floor.

Breakfast in the Devlin house happened in a glass room off the kitchen that looked out at the lake.

There were five chairs.

Mine was new.

You could tell, because the other four had worn spots on the arms.

Dad was behind the Tribune.

Mom was buttering toast she wasn't going to eat.

Brendan had his phone in one hand and his coffee in the other.

Verity sat across from me in a white cashmere robe, peeling a clementine in one perfect spiral.

"Did you sleep, sweetheart?" Mom asked.

"Some."

"I was telling Dad about the cottage. They have a heated pool for physical therapy."

"It's really beautiful," Verity said. "I looked at so many places. This one felt like her."

She'd never had a conversation with me that lasted longer than a threat.

"I'm not going," I said.

Dad lowered the paper.

Mom's knife stopped.

"Annabelle," Mom said gently. "Honey, it's the best program in the country."

"I'm sure it is."

"The doctors say you need..."

"I've been sent away for twenty-one years," I said. "I'm not getting in a car on Monday and being sent away again."

It came out louder than I meant.

Nobody said anything.

Out on the lake, a gull dropped a clam on the breakwater and went down after it.

Brendan set his phone face-down.

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