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Gabe calls back at 0900. Lindsey is up, groggy, but upright, sitting at my table in my T-shirt with a mug of coffee.

“I’m putting you on speaker,” I tell Gabe. He wastes no time.

“Brett Kessler died in a motorcycle wreck outside Elko, Nevada, in March of 2015,” Gabe says. “Drunk, ran his bike under a semi. Didn’t hurt anybody else, thank God.”

Lindsey sets her coffee down, tentatively.

“He’s really dead?” she asks as if it hasn’t sunk in.

“Gone for eleven years now. He’s got a cousin still in the valley. Guy named Wade, works at the gravel pit. But Brett’s gone and so are most of his family, Lindsey. Whatever Danielle was scared of, it can’t hurt her anymore.”

“She doesn’t know,” Lindsey whispers. “Wherever she is. She doesn’t know it’s safe.”

“Thanks for calling, Gabe,” I say and disconnect the call.

Lindsey sits there with both hands around her mug, staring into space. I come around the table and crouch down in front of her chair.

“Hey,” I say.

She looks at me. Her eyes are bright and fierce.

“Somebody hid her car,” she says. “Someone helped her, Travis. And they’re still here in Eden. And they know where she is.”

Her chin lifts. “We’re going to find them.”

“Yeah, honey,” I reply, holding her hands in mine. “We are.”

That afternoon, while she’s at the shop, I start unpacking my boxes.

There are eleven of them. They’ve been stacked against my bedroom wall since Colorado, taped shut, labeled in my own block capitals. KITCHEN. BOOKS. ARMY. MISC. I didn’t open them in Colorado either. I didn’t open them in Texas before that. I open them now.

I’m two boxes in when she comes up the stairs at 1300, out of breath.

“Betsy saw you carry a box out to the dumpster,” she says. “She called the shop because she thinks you’re moving out.”

“I’m moving in.”

She stops in the doorway. Then she pushes up her sleeves and sits down on the floor next to the box marked for the kitchen.

“Move over,” she says. “I put the back-in-thirty sign up. I have twenty-eight minutes.”

The box has four plates, a second frying pan, a second pot, a coffee maker I replaced in Texas and five can openers.

Lindsey lines them up on the floor. She looks up at me. “Travis… why do you have five can openers?”

“Every time I moved, I couldn’t find the can opener.”

She giggles, crinkling her nose cutely. “So every time you bought a new one. And the old one was in this box.”

“Every time.”

She laughs until she has to lie down on my floor. I stack the plates in the cupboard and wait for her to finish, enjoying the sound. It takes a while and I’m glad.

The apartment feels… alive.

The box marked BOOKS is mostly paperback westerns and two field manuals I could recite in my sleep. Their pages are tattered and smell like gun oil.

“Oh what is this?” She holds up a copy of Wildflowers of the Rocky Mountains. “You’re kidding me.”