Chapter 5

Rolan's door shut across the lot.

He came their way without hurry, the way a man walks when he thinks the ending is already his.

"Out the passenger side," Elam said. "Quiet. Take her."

Meryl got her arms under Bex and lifted.

The girl came up warm and heavy, the bird tucked between them.

They moved low between the parked cars.

Behind them Rolan's shoes found the gravel edge of the lot.

Elam steered them into the back of the midway, past a dark funnel-cake trailer.

A teenager was chaining a ride gate for the night.

"Barns are closing," he called. "Last walk-through."

"Just getting our girl home," Elam said, easy, and the kid waved them through.

They slipped into the 4-H barn where the rabbits were.

Rows of wire cages, straw, the smell of pine shavings and feed.

A few 4-H kids were latching doors and carrying water jugs out the far end.

Elam found the dark corner past the last row, where the lights were already off.

They crouched behind a stack of empty carriers.

Meryl sat on an overturned bucket with Bex in her lap.

Through the open barn doors, the midway lights went out, one string at a time.

Rolan passed the doorway once.

Gray coat, pale eyes sweeping the cages.

Bex didn't wake. Meryl laid her hand flat over the girl's ear anyway.

He moved on.

The music cut off mid-song, and the fair went quiet the way a loud room does when the fan shuts off.

By half past ten the barn held only the three of them and forty sleeping rabbits.

Bex's breath slowed against Meryl's collarbone.

Elam kept his eyes on the gap in the doors.

"He won't quit tonight," he said, low. "But he can't walk her out of a public place without the law, and he won't call the law on himself. The order's against him."

Meryl eased the letter out of the tote with one hand.

She'd stopped reading at the line about Rolan.

She found her place and went on, holding her phone light low over the page.

Arden's hand had steadied here, like she'd set the pen down and picked it back up calmer.

She'd carved two birds that last winter at home, before any of it.

She left one on the dresser in her old room and took the other with her.

"I kept mine so she'd always have something of mine," the letter said. "I left yours on that dresser so you'd know I meant to come back up the driveway. I just ran out of road."

Meryl read it twice.

The matching bird had sat on Arden's dresser for three years.

Meryl had dusted around it and never once picked it up.

In her lap, Bex shifted.

Her eyes stayed shut. Her fingers turned the bird over, slow.

Half asleep, Bex fit her thumb into the chipped notch, the same spot Meryl's own had always found.