Page 7

"We don't know her," I told Clover, wrapping the other half for later, because saving half was a rule and rules were how I stayed upright. "We don't know anyone. We're being careful."

Clover looked profoundly unconvinced. I started the truck and turned it toward the gravel.

The pavement gave out at the edge of town, and after that it was gravel and washboard and the long amber light of a March evening, and the valley opened up around me like something out of a calendar you'd never believe was a real place.

The Madison Range stood along the west with snow to its shoulders, and the low sun was doing something to that snow — turning it gold, then rose-gold, the kind of color you'd call fake if you saw it in a painting. Pastures ran down to the creek bottoms in every shade of brown a landscape can hold, and along the water, where I knew to look, the first green was coming in, low and secret, spring climbing up out of the creek an inch at a time. Cattle drifted dark across the fields. Somewhere a meadowlark was making an argument for itself. The whole thing was so beautiful it made my chest physically hurt, an actual ache under the sternum, and I felt the ache and immediately distrusted it, on principle, because the last time something that beautiful had made my chest hurt, it had a showroom smile and a whitened grin and it told me I was different from other girls in a voice like warm oil, and I believed every word for eighteen months before I understood I'd been sold something.

That was the thing nobody warned you about. Derek at the beginning wasn't a red flag. Derek at the beginning was the view. He opened doors and remembered my coffee order and paid for everything with a little wave of his hand like money was beneath discussing, and my chest had ached exactly like this, and I'd called it love because I was twenty-three and nobody had ever handled me carefully before and I didn't know yet that handled and held are different words for a reason.

So no. I didn't trust beautiful. Beautiful would have to fill out an application like everybody else.

Derek never even raised his voice, not really; he didn't have a temper, he had a thermostat, and he kept every room at exactly the temperature that suited him. And some nights, lying on a mattress in an apartment rented under a stranger's kindness, I'd run the whole three years through the courtroom in my head — no marks, no police report, no smoking gun — and the verdict would come back the way it always came back: you overreacted, Jojo. You blew up a comfortable life over nothing anyone can point to. He bought you a truck. He paid the rent. Some women would kill for a man who cared that much about where you were.

And then I'd remember the receipts.

Grocery receipts, flattened and stacked on the kitchen counter every Sunday night, with a yellow highlighter. Him at the counter in his weekend polo, going down the column, marking. The organic peanut butter, highlighted, because the regular was two dollars less and did I think money grew on trees, said smiling, always smiling — Jojo, I'm just helping you learn. Nobody ever taught you this stuff. I'd stood in that kitchen at twenty-five years old with my own paycheck going into an account only he could fully see, watching a grown man highlight peanut butter, and I'd apologized. That was the part the courtroom in my head always skipped. I'd apologized, and I'd meant it, because by then he'd spent two years teaching me that the ledger was love and I was permanently overdrawn.

Or the Tuesday. If the receipts didn't do it, the Tuesday always did.

The clinic job in Belgrade — full-time, benefits, a large-animal practice that would have used everything I had. I'd applied in secret, which should have told me something all by itself, and they'd called, and I'd floated for two days. Then Tuesday afternoon I came out of the shower and Derek was sitting on the edge of the bed with my phone in his hand — my phone, unlocked, because he'd set the passcode himself when he bought it, another gift with a door in the back — and he was talking in his salesman voice, warm and regretful, so sorry for the confusion, she's decided the commute isn't realistic, we appreciate your time. And he'd hung up, and looked at me standing there dripping in a towel, and he'd smiled — the real smile, the one that arrived a half-second before his eyes did — and said, "We decided that one's not a fit, babe. You'd have hated the drive."

We decided. I could still feel the exact temperature of that moment. The water going cold on my skin. The distance to the door, which I'd measured without knowing I was measuring, which was the first time my body knew what my brain took another year to admit.

So yeah, he never hit me. He just held me underwater with both hands and called it swimming lessons, and there wasn't a checkbox on any form for that, so I got to spend the rest of my life explaining it to a jury that only existed in my own skull.

The washboard rattled the wing mirror loose of its angle and I fixed it at forty miles an hour without thinking, and I said my rule out loud to the windshield, because saying it out loud was part of the maintenance.

"No big men. Never again." The road hummed. "Nothing in my life I can't lift myself."

That was the whole constitution. Derek was six feet of gym muscle and I'd spent three years learning what it meant to share a hallway with a body that could fold mine up like a lawn chair whenever it stopped choosing not to — not that it ever did, he never had to, that was the elegance of it, the size did the talking so the man never had to raise his voice. So: no big men. Nothing I couldn't carry, lift, move, or leave in under an hour. A duffel life. And the new-life spec, drafted over six months of night shifts and taped inside my skull where the courtroom used to be: work hard. Be useful. Be so good at the job that the job protects you. Stay small, stay pleasant, stay off everyone's radar. Save every dollar over rent and beans until there was enough to refinance the truck out from under his signature — the credit union woman had said eighteen months, maybe fourteen if the raise came through — and on the day his name came off that title, I was going to buy myself a sheet cake and eat it alone with a fork, and it was going to be the finest meal of my life.

Doc Whitmore's directions rode on a sticky note pressed to the dash, in handwriting like a seismograph: CC Ranch — 8 mi — left at the leaning mailbox. You'll know the mud when you meet it. Which at the time had seemed like a folksy little flourish, a country doctor being colorful.

The light was going long and low, the mountains catching the last of the pink, and up ahead on the left, at the mouth of a gravel drive that ran back toward a cluster of red barns and a big log house maybe half a mile off, a mailbox leaned out of the fence line at an angle no sober mailbox would choose.

"That'll be us," I told Clover, and slowed, and put my blinker on for an audience of cows.

***

The turn off the county gravel looked like a road. I want that on the record. It looked like a road — graded, drained, respectable, the first thirty feet of it firm under my tires — and then the firmness just ended, the way a dock ends, and the front end of the Ford dropped an inch and slewed left like the ground had grabbed it by the ankle.

Gumbo. I knew the word before I knew what was happening — every large-animal person in Montana knows the word — but knowing the word and feeling two tons of truck turn into a toboggan are different educations. The back end came around lazy and huge, and I steered into it, and the steering did approximately nothing, because the wheels weren't touching road anymore, they were touching pudding. Four seconds. It took maybe four seconds, and I made every one of them worse. Because when the truck bogged down and shuddered and began, horribly, to stop, every animal instinct I had screamed don't stop, stopping is dying, and I did the one thing you must never do in mud.

I gunned it.

The engine roared. The tires spun up and screamed and dug, flinging mud in great arcing ropes past both windows, and the truck didn't go forward so much as down, settling with a sort of gluttonous slurping finality, like the earth had been waiting all winter for exactly this meal. When I finally took my foot off the gas the silence came in ringing, and the Ford sat tilted and still, buried to the axles, thirty feet from the county road and a half mile from the ranch, in the exact geometric center of nowhere.

I sat there. Breathed. Checked my mirrors, out of pure stupid habit, as though what was behind me mattered when I couldn't move.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. It's fine. Assess."

I opened the door and stepped down to assess and the mud swallowed my boot to the shin. Cold soaked through instantly, and when I pulled the boot came halfway off my foot with a sound like a kiss from something awful, and I stood there in the falling dusk, one hand on the door, mud to my knees, assessing.

The truck was buried. Really buried — not stuck-buried, tow-truck-buried, and that was when the arithmetic arrived, the way it always arrived, instantly and in his voice. A tow out here, eight gravel miles from a town with one of everything: a hundred fifty if the tow guy was a saint, two-fifty if he was a businessman, and I had three hundred forty dollars in the glove box and no more where that came from until my first check, which meant one bog hole stood to take between forty-four and seventy-three percent of my entire net worth, and I did those percentages in my head in about a second and a half, because three years with Derek had made me very fast at the math of my own dependence. And to call the tow at all I'd have to turn on the phone. The dead black rectangle on the seat. Turn it on, watch it find a signal, watch six months of whatever was waiting come in with it, all those little reasonable sentences stacking up on the screen — for a tow truck. And even that skipped over the real jewel of the situation, which was that any minute now my brand-new employers were going to look down their drive and see the vet tech, the professional, the skilled hands Doc had promised them, planted axle-deep in their driveway like a lawn ornament, on day one, before hello.

Can't manage one driveway, Jojo. The voice didn't even have the decency to be a memory of something he'd actually said. It was worse than that — it was fluent, it was generative, it could produce new material in his exact register on demand. This is what I mean, babe. This is why. You need somebody. Look at you.

"Shut up," I said out loud, to nobody, to the mud, and went to get the boards.