Chapter 7: The Curve

"You don't have to go back out there," Ray said.

"Yes, I do."

He didn't argue.

He filled a thermos with coffee and put a blanket on the seat of the truck, and on Tuesday we drove west again.

It took four hours.

The closer we got, the less I talked.

By the time the trees closed over the road I had both hands flat on my stomach and I couldn't feel my fingers.

Ray turned the radio off.

"We can stop," he said.

"Keep going."

The Hoh ranger station was a low wooden building with a moss roof and a flag snapping in the wet wind.

Ray knew the ranger at the desk.

She was a woman in her forties with a gray braid down her back and a radio clipped to her shoulder.

"Ray," she said. "Thought you retired."

"Did. This is Hannah. She's the one I found last Friday."

The ranger looked at my boot.

Then she looked at my face.

"Come sit down," she said.

"I'd rather show you."

She drove us in a park truck, with Ray's pickup behind.

Five miles.

It took eight minutes.

Jared had said I'd live, because it was only five miles.

I'd been five miles from this desk, on the same road, for seven days.

"Here," I said.

I knew it before she even slowed down.

There was a big maple leaning over the ditch.

A mile marker with a bullet hole in it.

The shoulder where his tires had slid.

The mud had been rained smooth since then.

You'd never know anything happened there.

The ranger got out. I got out after her on my crutches.

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