Page 54

"Well-dressed. City boots, never seen mud. Pleasant as a loan officer." Doc said pleasant the way other men said spoiled. "Said he was family. Worried about you. Said—" and the eyebrows came down all the way, and he looked at the counter, and his voice went flatter, reciting it like a symptom list he didn't like the look of — "said you'd been unwell. Off your medication. Said you were prone to running off, telling stories, and he only wanted to know you were all right, and could I tell him how you were doing, where you were staying, how you'd seemed."

"What did you tell him?" My voice came from somewhere else. Some other room.

"Nothing." The word came out like a fence post going into ground. "Told him I don't discuss my staff with strangers, and he smiled and thanked me and apologized for troubling me and left a card, which I threw away, and I watched him walk to his truck — big shiny thing, detailed like a parade float — and it sat wrong with me all night." He looked up at me then, straight on. "Man smiled the whole way through it. Whole performance. And the smile never once got up into the eyes. I've had thirty-four years of reading animals that can't talk, and everything about that fellow was talking, and all of it was lying." A beat. "Also, no family of yours would need to ask where you're staying. Family would know."

My stomach lurched.

He'd been here.

He'd been here yesterday, in this clinic, standing on this linoleum, smiling at this old man, saying my name — and the whole morning reorganized itself around that fact in about four seconds, every averted eye on Main Street pulling out of its file and re-shelving itself under a new and infinitely worse heading. The clerk who wouldn't look at me. Off her medication. The bench going quiet, watchful, almost sorry. Prone to running off. The women at the pharmacy counter, the needle lifted off the record, the one word through the closing door. Poor thing. Poor thing. They hadn't been judging the new girl for taking up with Big Boone. They'd been told — carefully, warmly, door to door by a concerned and handsome man — that the new girl was unwell, unstable, a teller of stories, and they'd spent the morning looking at me the way you look at something fragile that doesn't know it's fragile.

He hadn't come to town to find me. He'd come to town to get there first.

My back found the hallway wall. I don't remember choosing the wall; the wall chose me, and I slid down half a foot before my knees remembered they had a job, and the roaring came up in my ears, the creek-in-flood sound, and somewhere through it Doc's voice was saying my name in the register he used for stock going down.

"Marsh. Josie." A hand — the good one — gripping my shoulder, surprising strong. "Breathe. There it is. Again." And then, gruff, without letting go: "Want me to call Hutchins?"

And here is what my mouth did: my mouth said, "No — thank you, I'm fine." Just like that. Smooth, automatic, three years polished, the old sentence rising up out of the wreckage fluent as ever, apologizing for existing, minimizing on pure muscle memory, don't make a fuss, don't be a cost — and I heard it leave me and I hated it, I hated it the way you hate a stranger's handwriting turning up in your own diary. Fine. Standing collapsed against a wall in a veterinary clinic, white to the hairline, fine.

Doc's eyebrows called the lie before I could. "That," he said, "is the worst lie told in this building since a man swore to me his dog bit itself. Try again."

"I'm not fine." My voice shook and I let it. "There's a file. With Hutchins, since yesterday. I'll — we'll add this to it. Today. I just need—" a breath, another one — "I need a minute, and then I need to tell Boone, and I'd rather tell him fed and sitting down than in your parking lot."

Doc looked at me a long moment, and then he nodded, once, and said, "Card's in the trash if you want the license plate off it. I wrote it on my hand first," and held up the cast, where sure enough, in among the children's signatures, a plate number sat in his cramped hand like one more autograph. Thirty-four years of reading liars. I could have kissed him.

Boone was at the truck when I came out, sliding the last box of fluids into the back seat where the feed dust wouldn't reach it, and he took one look at me across twenty feet of parking lot — one look, the four-hundred-yard read — and his whole frame changed, not visibly, nothing the town could have seen, just the stillness arriving.

"You're pale," he said, when I reached him. His hand came up and his knuckle touched my cheek, cataloguing. "When'd you eat?"

"Breakfast."

"Mm." The verdict. "Bluebird. Now. Whatever it is, it goes better with food in you, and you're going to tell me all of it." Not a question. He opened my door and handed me up into the cab like something that mattered, and I sat there with my heart slamming and the plate number copied into my phone and thought: over lunch. Same-day. All of it, per the paper. I just needed the words in the right order first.

***

The Bluebird hit us with griddle heat and bacon and the low midday murmur of half the valley eating, and Marnie was on us before the door had finished closing, coffee pot already in hand.

"Hon," she said to me, and then she looked at my face for exactly half a second longer than a greeting requires. Read it. Filed it. Her eyes flicked to Boone, then back, and something in her settled into a different gear, and she said, "Back booth's open," in a voice that made the back booth sound like a medical decision, and walked us there herself.

Boone put me on the inside of the booth. He did it without a word, just a hand at the small of my back steering, and folded himself onto the outside bench where his shoulders closed the whole lane and his eyes had the door. I was in the most defended seat in Silver Bend. Marnie poured two coffees, said "meatloaf's right today, the special's lying," took our order — meatloaf twice, Boone answering for both of us because I'd stared at the menu like it was written in weather — and left us, and her cloth started its rounds two tables down, and I wrapped both hands around my mug and started rehearsing.

Because I had to tell him now, before the food came, before another minute of him not knowing. I owed it same-day. The words had been shuffling themselves the whole block over. I put down the mug and took the breath and said, "Boone. He's—"

The bell over the door rang.

I knew before I looked. The bell rang the way it had rung forty times since we sat down, one bright brass note, no different — and every hair on my body stood up in the same instant, some animal channel older and faster than sight already flooding me with the old chemistry, and I looked up, and it was him.

Derek came into the Bluebird, dealership-crisp — pressed button-down under an open coat that had never met weather, the haircut expensive, the boots decorative, the whole polished catalogue of him — and he paused just inside the door and swept the room with a pleasant, mild, searching look, a worried man scanning a diner, and I watched the smile arrive on his face a half-second before his eyes finished finding me, which meant he'd known exactly where I was before the bell stopped ringing. He'd probably watched us walk in. He'd probably timed it.

"Jojo." He said it across the whole room, warm, breaking, relieved — pitched at exactly the volume that made every fork in the Bluebird pause — and he came down the aisle between the booths with his hands slightly open at his sides, harmless, wounded, a man approaching a frightened animal, and my body—

My body did what it was built to do. Three years of training fired all at once, every circuit, and I felt myself get smaller in the booth. Felt it happen — shoulders curling, chin dropping, hands going flat and quiet on the table, the whole apparatus of appeasement booting up on muscle memory, and underneath it the pull, the awful fluent pull I'd forgotten the strength of: stand up. Manage this. Smile, keep your voice down, get him outside before it costs anything, agree with the small things so the big things stay asleep, be smooth, be smaller, handle him. For three years that pull had been the difference between a quiet night and a loud one, and it did not care that I was five hundred days out and four hundred miles away and sitting behind the widest shoulders in Montana. It just pulled.

"Sweetheart." He arrived at the end of our table and stopped at the exact respectful distance, and up close he was so much the same that my stomach rolled — the whitened smile, the cologne, the warmth, God, the warmth, poured out over me like syrup. "Look at you. God, everyone's been frantic — your sister, your mom, everybody. Six months, Jojo. Six months, not one call, and then your picture turns up in a newspaper." A little laugh, wet at the edges, beautifully done. "I drove up the same day. I had to see for myself you were okay."

And then he did the thing. The thing I'd watched him do in front of doctors and landlords and my own mother, the thing I could never make anyone see because seeing it requires knowing where the seams are: he turned, just slightly, a few degrees, opening his shoulders to the counter and the booths, and his voice shifted registers — still warm, still reasonable, but projected now, calibrated for the room, the sad confiding pitch of a good man at the end of his rope — and he ran the script.

"She does this." Gentle. To everyone. To the retired ranchers at the counter, the family in the window booth, the two women from the pharmacy — they were here, I registered distantly, both of them, watching over their pie. "She runs. She stops taking her medication and she runs, and she spins these stories, and — I'm not here to make a scene, I promise. I'm not here to make anything hard for anybody." The sad smile went around the room like a collection plate. "I just want to know she's safe. That's all any of us have ever wanted."