She is quiet. She knows the answer.
I cannot give up Evangeline.
She is quiet for the longest count of the night. I sit on the chopping block and I look up at where her face is in the dark and I do not move and I do not soften and I do not take thesentence back. I have said it. The sentence is mine. I have known the sentence was mine since the truck cab forty minutes ago. The sentence has been sitting in me since the meeting room this morning. The sentence has been sitting in me, in pieces, since I walked away from the burning Clark mansion with Evangeline in my arms. She is mine.
"Hale."
"Chief."
"Stand up."
I stand.
She steps closer. The pines are at her back. I can see her face now in the small light from the moon and the porch behind us. She looks tired. She looks old. Her eyes are the cold gray they have been since Wednesday. She lifts her hand and she puts the back of two fingers against my jaw, the way she put the back of her hand against my jaw at the academy in 2007 when I broke my nose in the third week and I would not cry and she leaned in and told me I would not last six months if I did not learn to cry sometimes.
The fingers stay a count.
She drops her hand.
"All right," she says.
"Chief."
"All right, Hale."
"I."
"Don't."
"Yes, Chief."
She steps back.
She turns.
She walks down the path toward the porch light. She does not look at me. Her boots are loud on the pine needles. She walks past the side of the cabin and past the porch and past my truck, and she opens her car door, and she sits in the seat, and shecloses the door, and the engine starts, and the headlights come on, and she backs the car down the drive in a long slow arc, and the lights cross the front of the cabin, and the lights wash the porch and the front window and the boards under the porch where the wool hat fell, and the lights leave.
The drive is dark.
The porch light is on.
I stand at the chopping block in the pines and I listen to the engine of her car go down the drive and turn at the road and head south, and I listen until I cannot hear it anymore, and then I listen a count further to the wind in the pines and the small owl up the ridge.
I sit on the chopping block.
I put my hands flat on the wood on either side of my thighs, and I sit, and I do the breathing she taught me at the academy, in for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four. I do it ten counts. I do not move.
The scar on my forearm hums.
I have had the scar for eleven years. The scar is the scar from a back-draft in 2014 that should have killed me and that did not because Val pulled me out by the strap of my coat, and the scar is the scar I have been told the story of in my own head for eleven years, and the story has been the story of a woman who owes a woman her life, and the story has been the floor under everything I have done in those eleven years.
The story is still the story.
The scar is still the scar.
Evangeline is still Evangeline and nothing will persuade me to let her go.
I wonder what Val will do.
