Chapter 10

Glen went into the hospital in St. Johnsbury with a diagnosis of over-sedation, dehydration, and a urinary infection, and by the next morning he was awake and asking for coffee. He'd been dosed twice on the twenty-second, by a woman who had stockpiled three nights of his medication in her own dresser drawer and used it to make him look like a man who needed a guardian.

Corinne was charged with forgery, elder abuse, and attempted assault. She spent that first night in the county lockup, which is a sentence I have thought about every day since.

Seth was charged with hindering, witness tampering, and child endangerment, for coaching his son and for taking my phone and for standing in a doorway with his arms crossed while his mother put a pen in my hand.

The farm went into a receivership by February. The north ridge sold to somebody out of Maine. Not the New Hampshire company. Not Corinne's company.

I didn't get the land. I never wanted it.

Here is what I got.

I got to keep Micah.

Ms. Provost wrote the recommendation herself, and the court read it, and the county placed Glen under a neutral guardianship with a public guardian who has actually read his chart. He lives in a memory-care home in Lyndon now. I go on Thursdays. He calls me Josie about half the time, and he calls me his daughter-in-law the other half, and either way he eats his pudding.

I signed three papers on the morning of the twenty-third. A safety plan. A victim statement. A police report.

I did not sign the fourth page.

I moved in with my mother's cousin in Hardwick, which is forty minutes of two-lane road and feels like another country. The baby is due in April. Micah started a new preschool in January and has already learned the word substitute.

Seth called me eleven times the first week.

He called me zero times since the county filed the no-contact order.

He wrote me a letter in February. Three pages, in pencil. He said he never meant for it to go that far, that his mother had a way of making things sound like they were already decided, that I of all people should understand how she could make a person do things. He asked me to think about Micah. He asked me to think about the farm.

I read it twice. Then I put it in the stove.

The last thing I did before I left the farmhouse was walk out to the wreath barn one more time. The heater was off. The wreath benches were stacked with January's unsold stock, dry and browning at the tips. The concrete still had a dark ring where I'd lain on it with my arm around my father-in-law's pill box.

I stood there for a while.

Then I took the walkie-talkie out of my apron pocket. It was the second one, the kitchen one, the one that still worked. I'd traded the dead one to the sheriff for the case number, and I'd kept the twin, because it was Micah's, and because I had earned something small out of that afternoon and this was it.

I didn't try to press anything.

I just held it, and then I put it back in my pocket, where it sits every day now, flat against my hip, dead, useless, and mine.

Micah asked me once, in the car on the way to Hardwick, what the police did with the bad one.

"They kept it," I said.

"Forever?"

"Forever."

He thought about that for a mile of Route 2.

"Good," he said.

And he turned his face to the window, and I drove him up out of the valley, and neither of us looked back.