Chapter 7: Terms

"No," Caleb said again, at six the next morning, with his hand flat on my mother's kitchen table.

He had slept in his truck outside, and he hadn't shaved.

I had slept on my mother's couch with the tin under my pillow.

"You can't stay with them," he said. "You can't live in that house and look her in the face."

"I looked her in the face yesterday. She poured me tea."

"Stevie."

"Listen to me first."

I put my phone on the table and swiped to the photographs.

The note, the ledger, the red number.

My father's last birthday card, with his looped F and the line beneath it, sitting beside a signature that looked drawn by a stranger.

"She wants the deed to this house," I said.

"I know."

"She wants me to hand it over, politely, in front of Warner. That's what the lunch is for."

"So don't go."

"If I don't go, she knows I know. She files on the house and the diner the same week."

He didn't answer.

"Gus Thayer is alive," I said. "He can talk, a few words at a time."

"I know that."

"He grabbed my wrist and tried to tell me it was a gift. A nurse watches him every hour, and I'm the only one he's said it to."

"And if she catches you?"

"Then I did what you did for three years."

He looked at me then.

It was a hard, tired look, and under it something moved that hadn't moved since the porch.

"I won't let you do it alone," he said.

"You can't be near that house. She'd know in a day."

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