Chapter 6

That night it rained-a hard, sideways, late-summer rain that turned the boatyard to soup and drummed on the shed-boat tarp like fists.

Wren brought two blankets, a flashlight, and a thermos of soup. Birdie had made a nest in the shed boat: a bedroll of stolen tarps, a jam jar of water, a pencil stub and a flattened cardboard box covered in tiny numbers.

"What's that?" Wren asked.

"Ledger." Birdie pulled the box into her lap, protective. "What people owe me and what I owe. Docks, mostly."

"You're nine."

"So? You sleep out here and you'd keep a ledger too." Birdie drank the soup in fast, scalding sips. "I worked the fish house for tips. I swept the launch ramp. I rowed a guy's dinghy back for a dollar. Then a whole cooler of bait went missing and they decided it was the foster kid, and the fish house man told the placement, and the placement lady said one more strike." She shrugged. "So I was gone before the strike."

"Where?"

"Marquette first. Then down the shore. Then here, 'cause there's work and nobody knows me." She looked at Wren sideways. "You ever been the one they decide is bad? Like before you do anything. Like it's already in your file."

Wren thought of the note in her drawer, of fourteen months of pity, of the way the whole harbor had decided she was the poor brave girl who got saved.

"Yeah," she said. "Different file."

Birdie considered that. She seemed to accept it, which was somehow worse.

They sat in the dark with the rain. Birdie talked in fits-scraps of placements, a dog she liked, a boy who bit her, a caseworker who smelled like cigarettes. She talked the way a person drinks water after a long walk, like she'd been saving it and didn't know when it would be offered again.

"You could've given me to the sheriff," Birdie said at last. "You didn't."

"No."

"Everybody does."

"Not this time."

The girl lay back on the tarps and put her fist over the beanie, holding it in place, holding her one thing safe.

Wren sat awake a long while with the rain coming down, doing the last of her arithmetic.

If she married Grant, the dock was saved, the debt was paid, the town stayed sweet on her, and she could maybe raise the girl quiet under a man's roof that already had a crack in it. If she didn't, the note came due Thursday, the lease renewed on his terms, and a nine-year-old witness went back to a county that had already written her down as a thief-or worse, went to Grant's attention now that she was the last one left.

There was a clean exit and there was a true exit, and they did not lead to the same place.

Somewhere near morning the rain stopped. Wren looked at the sleeping child, then reached into her jacket for the ring she had put back in her pocket that evening without admitting why.

She put it on the plank between them. She left it there in the rain-wet hull and didn't pick it up again.