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"So you'll have to be the one with the manners and ask him. Thank you so much for everything."

Then she goes back inside her house and shuts her own door, and I hear her turn the radio on in her own kitchen at eleven o'clock in the morning.

Gage doesn't start the truck.

"Thank you," he says, to the windshield.

"I’m glad I could help." I take his hand off the wheel and put it in mine, and his fingers are shaking, which he'd deny under oath.

"I think I’m sleeping for the rest of the day."

"Sounds good to me."

"So, take me home," I say. "Let’s get some sleep. And then I want you to do the thing your father did."

He goes so still the truck feels smaller.

"Only you're going to ask me first before you claim me."

52

GAGE

NOVEMBER THIRD

Maren's asleep on my chest with her hand closed around my wrist, and I have spent the last hour of my life building one sentence.

I've torn a door off a house with my hands. I stood in front of nine creatures on my own grass and didn't move. I have never once asked a person for anything out loud.

Outside the window the light goes down orange over her roof, twelve feet away. Someone two streets over is dragging pumpkins to the curb.

She wakes the way she does everything, all at once.

"What time is it?"

"Six."

"I slept all the way through? Did you sleep?"

"Some."

"Liar." She gets an elbow under her and props up on my chest, hair everywhere, one cheek printed with the seam of my shirt. "You've had plenty of time, Corbett. Ask me."

"I'm going to tell you what it is first."

"You're stalling."

She settles. That's the thing about her. When it matters she stops swinging and lets me get there.

"It's a mark," I say. "Teeth, here." I touch the place where her neck runs into her shoulder. "It doesn't fade. It doesn't wash off.

Her eyes go somewhere for a second, back to my mother's kitchen, that chair, that cup.

"So I'm the only thing that can undo it."

I have to work to keep my voice level. "Yes. That's the part I need you to hear. If I do this and you wake up in six months and want it gone, there's exactly one person alive who can give you that, and she's lying on top of me."

"That's convenient."