Chapter 12: Every Vote

Ford's POV

She sat in the car with her forehead on the wheel.

I stood in the doorway with a cardboard box and could not make my feet cross the lot.

I had practiced it for two days.

I had practiced it on the dock, and in the truck, and in front of the yard's one mirror.

None of it was any use now.

I walked over and stopped at her window.

She rolled it down.

"I'm not coming back," Dessa said.

"I know."

"Then why are you here?"

"To give you this." I held the box through the window. "And to say it, since you asked me not to lie."

She did not take it.

She looked at me with her gray eyes red at the rims, and she waited.

"I knew," I said. "About the trust. I'd known for ten years."

"I got that part."

"I never wanted it. I left the house at twenty-six, and I didn't take a dollar."

I breathed in.

"I told myself the day would pass, I'd still be unmarried, and it would go to Lowell. That would be the end of it."

"And then I walked in."

"And then you said you'd marry the next man through the door."

I heard my voice go low.

"Just to see his face. Any man. Anyone at all."

"I said it to be loud."

"I know that," I said. "But I'm the one who walked in."

She said nothing.

"It's the thing I've been carrying since Thursday," I said. "You would have said it to any man."

"Ford."

"The courthouse, the ring, the boat. I was the one who happened to be sitting there."

"That's not fair."

"No," I said. "It isn't. I knew that when I asked."

I looked at the lot lights.

"That's why I didn't tell you about Sunday. I wanted you to marry me because it was me, and I knew it wasn't."

She opened the car door so fast it hit my knee.

She got out and stood in front of me in the lot lights, and she was shaking.