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A long breath comes down the line from the middle of the country.

“I’ll send it in the morning.”

“Thank you.”

“Can I say one thing.”

“You may say one thing.”

“I’d do it again, and I know that’s the wrong answer, and I’m not going to sit here and give you a better one at midnight so you’ll hang up happy.”

It is the only honest thing he has said since he picked up the phone, and I hate it, and I would hate the alternative more.

“Good night, Colt.”

“Night.”

I go up. Her door is open four inches, the way she likes it.

She is asleep on the good mattress with one arm hanging off the side of it. The lamp is still in its box on the floor because nobody told them where it went. The desk is against the wall under the window where the light will reach it at six.

I go back down and take the drawing off the refrigerator. February. Green. Four drawers down the left, the S the wrong way around.

I put it on the desk. In the middle, squared to the edges, where she will see it before she sees anything else.

Then I stand in a room that cost more than my car with my hand on the back of a chair I did not buy, listening to my daughter breathe in the deepest sleep she has had since Christmas.

Saturday we are painting over it.

Chapter twenty-seven

Colt

Silas gave me five minutes on the Friday after the courthouse and used four of them.

I went into his office with the ring still new on my hand and found my contract open on the desk between us.

“We’re not doing next year yet,” he said.

“Wasn’t aware I’d asked.”

“You haven’t.”

He turned the page anyway. My name was at the top, and three numbers in the middle I already knew.

“We want another month on the shoulder. Medical after that. Then we talk.”

“About what?”

“Next season.”

I leaned back. “That what this is?”

“This is me telling you before you hear it somewhere else.”

“Who told you the shoulder needed another month?”

“Maren did.”