Chapter 21: The Third Step

Rowan's POV

She carried the sign out to the dock herself.

I walked behind her with a flashlight I didn't need.

The dock lights were still on, and the tent glowed over the empty lawn.

It was nearly midnight.

The cold had come down hard after the crowd left.

The lake was black and flat, with a thin skin of ice along the shore.

Tegan stopped at the very end, where the red canoe was tied.

She stood with the neon in her arms, its dull glass tubes spelling out her own name.

"Do you want help?" I asked.

"No."

"Do you want me to say something?"

"No." She looked down at it. "I want to do it, and not feel anything about it."

"Do you?"

"A little."

She held it out over the water and let go.

It went in with a heavy, flat sound, and sank.

For a moment I saw the pink letters turning below the surface, faint in the dock light.

Then it was gone.

She stood very still.

I put my jacket around her shoulders, over the cardigan.

She leaned back into me, and we watched the black place where it had been.

"That's three years of cleaning I'll have to do in the kitchen," I said.

She laughed, and it came out of her wet.

"Thank you," she said. "For all of it. For keeping the house."

"I'd have done it anyway."

"I know. That's why I'm saying it."

We went up the lawn together.

She stopped on the porch and looked at the third step, the one that dipped.

"Fix it," she said.

"It comes back."

"Fix it anyway. And then leave it, if it comes back. It can be like that."

In the kitchen, she sat down at Gran's table, under the blank place on the wall where the sign had hung.

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