Chapter 1

I knew Derek was home wrong when the door hit the wall at one o’clock. He was supposed to be out on the ice until dark, pulling shanties for the guys who paid him. But he came in with his cap down and his pupils wide, and the cold came off him in a slab. The duffel was open on our bed. I had packed it three times and unpacked it twice. This time I hadn’t had time.

“What’s that?” he said. “Donating,” I said. “Some of my old stuff.” He laughed. It was a bad laugh, thin and bright. “You don’t have old stuff, Emmie. You got what I gave you.” He walked past me and dumped the bag. The clinic card fell out. The forty dollars in ones. The envelope with the rest of my money-three hundred and change, money I’d skimmed off the deposit slips, money he would kill me over if he knew how long I’d been saving it. He held it up. “You going somewhere?” “Monday,” I said. “Verne’s taking me to the clinic.” “Monday,” he repeated. “You think I’m stupid.” I didn’t answer. That was the wrong answer too. He took the money. He took my keys. He took the phone I didn’t have, because he’d already smashed it in November and put the pieces in a coffee can. Then he took my arm and walked me out to the truck.

The ice road was a gray line through standing water. Three days of rain had left the lake looking like a parking lot after a flood. Derek drove with one hand, the other on his knee, and he didn’t talk. That was worse than yelling. When he yelled, I knew where the edges were. Silence meant he was deciding.

He passed the last row of rented shanties. They were dark and tilted, most of them pulled off after the thaw warning. Past the reed bed, he stopped at a shanty I had never seen. It was unpainted plywood, black rubber latch, a red-handled spud bar leaning outside. A little stovepipe. A pressure ridge heaving up six feet away. And past that, in the gray ice, a black circle of open water that steamed in the cold. The Black Spring. I knew it from my grandmother’s maps. It never froze.

“Get out,” he said. “Derek-” He yanked me off the seat. My boots hit the ice. It boomed under us, deep and hollow. I put my hand on the truck to steady myself and he shoved me. Not hard enough to kill me. Hard enough to put me on my hands and knees. My belly dragged low. My right palm split open on a chip of ice.

He stood over me. His boot came down eighteen inches from my head. I could see the tread, the salt stain, the laces. “Get up,” he said. “Baby’d be better off if you drowned.”

I didn’t crawl for the road. The road was four hundred yards behind us and he had the truck. The only thing within reach was the shanty. I got my good hand on the rubber latch and pulled. The door swung against drifted snow. I fell inside on my knees.

The dark had a shape. A cot. A milk crate. A paper plate with a tuna sandwich, crusts cut off. A little girl in fleece pajamas and an oversized gray sweatshirt. One snow boot. One sneaker. She was five, maybe. Thin. Short brown hair cut uneven. She looked at me the way kids look when they have learned not to ask adults for anything.

A pink snowsuit hung on a nail inside the door, size 5, faded, one cuff mended with green thread, POPPY written in marker on the tag.

“Hi,” I whispered. She didn’t answer.

On the milk crate beside a small jump pack, a black phone was charging. The screen lit when I moved. A text thread was open. BO. Sunday. 6 a.m. Boat launch. $6,500. Cash, no names. There was another thread, from a contact saved as D: she can’t stay here, he found the apartment. And a photo: Poppy asleep in the passenger seat of Derek’s truck, a black duffel against her leg.

My hand shook. I heard Derek’s boots outside. The shanty floor was ticking, already soft at the corner. I grabbed the phone. My split thumbnail found the SIM tray. I pried it open and slipped the little card into my mouth, up against my cheek. Then I jammed the phone into the girl’s left boot.

The door tore open. Derek seized my arm and hauled me out onto the ice. The girl made a sound like a bird hit glass. Derek reached down, pulled the boot off her foot, and shook it. The phone dropped into his hand. He turned it over once. He didn’t check the tray.

“You get away from her,” I said. He looked at me then, almost curious. Then he kicked the phone. It arced once and dropped into the Black Spring. The hole swallowed it with almost no sound.

He stood there watching the water close over it. Behind him, the shanty floor ticked. Water was already coming up through the boards. The girl’s two mismatched boots were beside mine on ice that flexed like a trampoline. And I had four numbers in my cheek, and nothing else.