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He was twenty-one. A mechanic in Ogden with a red Camaro. I remember him now, mostly because I didn’t like him.

Danielle was sneaking out to meet him and telling me he was sweet, but I didn’t see it.

The entries change after Christmas. They get shorter. Brett doesn’t like me talking to Linds so much. Brett says Linds is a bad influence. Brett got mad tonight because I was late. Brett grabbed my arm. Brett said he was sorry.

Then, in April, in handwriting that’s smaller and tighter than the rest:

I told B I want to go to Portland after graduation. He said if I ever leave he’ll find me. He said if I leave he’ll make Mom pay. He said he knows where Linds lives. He said he’d burn down the flower shop with her in it.

I read it again with a sick feeling taking hold of my stomach. He’d burn down the flower shop with her in it.

“Lindsey?” Carol says. “What is it?”

I can’t talk. I hold the diary out to her with my finger on the page. She reads it, and she puts her hand over her mouth, and makes a horrified sound I will never forget as long as I live.

In the doorway, Travis uncrosses his arms. “Lindsey.”

“She didn’t leave me,” I say. It comes out of me in a whisper. “Carol. She didn’t leave because I said no. She didn’t leave because she was mad at me. She left because he said he’d hurt us. She left to keep us safe.”

Carol puts both arms around me, holding me hard, and cries into my shoulder.

Oh god. Oh god. We had no idea. I hold her and stare over her head at the map of Oregon with the red pushpin in it. I don’t cry. I’m too angry.

Brett Kessler. Twenty-one, with his red Camaro and his big threats against a seventeen-year-old girl. I’d like to find him and kick him in the nuts.

Travis stays in the doorway until we’re done, but his expression is harder than I’ve ever seen it. I glimpse the soldier he used to be.

Carol walks us to the door a little after six. On the porch, she puts the diary in my hands and closes my fingers over it.

“Take it,” she says. “Read all of it. Then bring it back and tell me the good parts.” Her chin quivers and she looks away. “I’d like to hear the good parts, Lindsey.”

“I will. I promise.”

She looks past me at Travis on the steps. “You’ll look after her tonight.”

It isn’t a question.

“Yes, ma’am,” he says.

I make it to the end of Carol’s street before I start swearing. Travis pulls over under the cottonwoods by the irrigation ditch, turns off the truck and lets me. I call Brett Kessler every name I know and two I make up. I smack the dashboard.

“Seventeen years, Travis. I thought she was mad at me. I thought she went alone because I was a chicken, and all along she was—” I flop back against the seat. “Sorry about your dashboard.”

“It’s had worse.” He thinks. “You missed one name. Pissant.”

It surprises a laugh out of me. He reaches across the bench seat, unbuckles my seat belt and hauls me over against his side.

“I don’t want to go home,” I say. “I can’t sit in my kitchen with this thing tonight.”

“Then don’t go home.”

He drives me to the shop and walks me up his stairs instead of mine.

His apartment is still mostly boxes. He sits me on his couch and kneels down in front of me, and before I know what he’s doing, he’s unlacing my boots. Then he gets a pair of his own wool socks. They’re gray and enormous, and he puts them on my feet himself.

“Your feet are cold.”

“How do you know my feet are cold?”