Chapter 21: The Girl in the Yellow Dress

Hallie's POV

Levi came back from Nevada with both hands wrapped in white tape, and I did not hug him.

I stood on Lorna's porch under the light Garner had threatened to put out, with his postcard folded in my coat pocket, and looked at the tape.

"Cassidy told me," I said. "She called me before you landed."

"I figured."

"She also told me you stopped when she said your name."

"That's not the part that counts."

"No," I said. "It isn't."

He stood there on the step with his shoulders down.

I said what I had been saving, because it was fair and he deserved to hear it.

"I want you angry at them.

"I don't want you to be a man who hurts people because he can't stand it.

"If you ever hit someone in front of me again because you wanted to, I'll leave. I mean it."

"I know."

"Good."

He looked at his hands.

"I didn't want to stop," he said. "I want you to know that. That's the part that scares me."

I went down one step, so we were level.

I did not forgive him or tell him it was all right.

I took his taped hand between both of mine and held it, and that was the only answer I had.

His breath shook.

Behind us the screen door opened.

"Your phone," Lorna said. "It's the state agent. He says it's about the little one."

The girl in the yellow dress sat on a plastic chair in the county child welfare office in Sallisaw, with her shoes on and her knees together.

A caseworker in a cardigan sat beside her.

"She won't say her name," the caseworker told us softly in the hall. "She won't say where she came from. The only thing she does is hum."

"We've heard," I said.

"We've looked everywhere. Missing reports, school records. Nothing matches an eight-year-old from a laundromat in Joplin."

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