Chapter 10: Cedar Road

I waited until Trudy was asleep and my father had taken the tulips out to the car.

Then I said, "Whose thumb is that, Dalton?"

He stood by the window with his back to me.

"Noe, it's two in the morning. You've been awake thirty hours."

"Term one. You answer or you tell me you won't."

"I won't." His voice was a rasp. "Not tonight."

"I promise I'll tell you everything. Give me until you're home and rested."

"Is Arlen yours?"

He turned around so fast he knocked a plastic cup off the sill.

"No," he said. "God, no. Noelle. No. Whatever you think, no."

I believed him. That was the worst part.

It meant there was something worse than what I had been imagining, and he was still choosing not to say it.

"Okay," I said. "Then I'll find out another way."

Two days later my father drove us home from the hospital.

Trudy slept in the back, in the car seat Dalton had installed himself.

Dalton had gone ahead to the diner to pick up the discharge casserole his mother insisted on.

His jacket was on the hook by the door when we got in.

His keys hung out of the pocket.

One of them was brass, small and flat, with a green plastic tag.

Cedar Rd 114.

My father saw me looking at it.

"Noelle," he said.

"Dad, I just gave birth, and my husband has been lying to me for months."

"I would like to look at a storage unit."

He took a long breath through his nose.

"I'll get the baby," my father said. "You get your coat."

Cedar Road Storage was on the east edge of Duluth, a grid of orange doors behind a chain-link fence.

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