Chapter 9: One Summer

Eli drove me back up the mountain in the dark, and neither of us said a word for the first hour.

The heater ticked.

The headlights cut the pines into black and silver strips.

My gown lay folded in my lap, and my father's hug still sat in my ribs.

Dad had found me at the edge of the field after the guards let me go.

He had held my face in both hands.

"I should have said something about that boy years ago," he told me. "I'm sorry, kiddo."

"You didn't know."

"I knew he wasn't enough."

I had cried into his tie, and he had let me.

Now I looked at the man beside me.

Eli had stood at that fence for two hours and had not left.

When I came down off the stage, he had walked through three thousand people and put his jacket around my shoulders without a word.

"You were at the fence the whole time," I said.

"I was."

"Why?"

"In case somebody grabbed you."

"And if somebody had?"

His hands tightened on the wheel.

"Then I'd have been in the news too."

At the cabin he came around and opened my door, and I swung my legs out.

He reached for my boot, and I caught his wrist.

"Eli."

"Hm."

"Look at my hand."

I held up my left hand in the cab light.

The pale stripe was gone.

A week in the mountain sun had browned my finger to match the rest.

He looked at it for a long time.

"I don't take what's left over," I said, and I used his own voice, low and flat. "There isn't any."

His breath went out of him.

"June."

"I'm not asking for anything after August," I said. "One summer. No promises. Nobody says a word about the day after."

"You don't mean that."

"I mean it more than I've meant anything."

He took the gown out of my lap and set it on the dashboard.

Then he lifted me out of the truck the same way he had on the trail, and I did not pretend to mind.

He carried me across the snow and kicked the cabin door shut behind us.

He set me on the edge of the bed.

The stove glowed low and orange.

He knelt on the floor in front of me and unlaced my good boot first, then eased the brace off my bad one.

He set my foot on his thigh, and his palm went up my bare calf to the back of my knee.

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