Chapter 3

Eli talked for an hour.

He told her about the morning of the crash-how Roy Bellrose had come to the hangar early, before Eli got there, and worked on the fuel line himself. How the log entry for that morning had been torn out by the time investigators arrived. How the fitting had cracked along a seam no accident could have made clean. How Delphine had come to him two days after Daniel died and told him that if he took the blame, the family would pay for his defense and his mother's nursing home. How he'd been twenty-nine, broke, and scared, and had said yes.

He told her about the twelve years. He didn't dress them up.

Mari sat with the fitting in her lap and asked questions in a flat, steady voice-what the repair stamp looked like, who else had access to the hangar, whether anyone had ever tested the fitting. Eli answered every one. When she asked why he'd never gone to the sheriff after he got out, he said what he'd told himself for six years: he was a convicted felon with no money, and the Bellrose name was the law in three counties. Nobody would have believed him. And he'd been afraid that if he tried, he'd lose any chance of ever knowing her.

Mari flinched at that. She looked down at the fitting.

"You could have written to me."

"I didn't know what your grandmother had told you. I figured you'd grown up hating me. I figured that was the price."

"That was the lie," Mari said. "Not the price."

She stood up and paced the small room. Outside, the gas station sign buzzed. A truck downshifted on the highway.

"Roy still works the gin," she said. "He does the maintenance. He's been on that property every day for eighteen years."

"I know."

"He was there the day I found this in the debris. He told me it was junk and to throw it out."

Eli didn't say anything.

Mari stopped pacing and looked at him. "I'm supposed to marry Clay in six weeks. Delphine is paying for the whole thing. She's been planning it since Christmas."

"That's why I didn't want to walk into your supper with this," Eli said. "I wanted to give you the truth without blowing your life apart."

"My life is already blown apart," Mari said. "I just didn't know it until tonight."

She put the fitting back in the envelope and handed it to him.

"Keep it," she said. "Don't let it out of your sight. If Delphine knows you have it, she'll do something."

"She already tried to get rid of it once."

"This time she knows you fished it back out." Mari picked up her keys. "I have to go home and act like nothing happened. Tomorrow morning she's going to ask me about the wedding."

"What are you going to tell her?"

"Nothing yet. I need to find out what Roy knows and who else was in on it." She paused at the door. "Eli. Were you ever going to tell me the truth if I hadn't mailed you that fitting?"

He thought about it honestly. "I don't know. I'd like to say yes."

"That's the first true thing anybody in my family has said to me in years," Mari said, and left.

Eli sat in the chair for a long time after her car pulled out of the lot. He opened the envelope and looked at the fitting one more time. The varnish was flaking at the edge now, from the rain barrel and the motel bedspread and Mari's hands.

He put it back in the envelope and put the envelope under his pillow.

At eight the next morning, his motel phone rang.