2. Grant
TWO
GRANT
The deputy's name is Collins.
I've known him for years, not well, not the way you know people you've chosen to know, but in the way of a small county where everyone's business eventually overlaps with everyone else's.
He played JV football with a cousin of mine.
He bought his first car from a guy who bought it from Briar Auto.
He married a woman from the Lutheran church and he coaches Little League in spring and he has the particular brand of county-deputy energy that can go either way depending on the day: decent or petty, depending entirely on who's watching.
Tonight, alone with me in the interview room after Jessika and Nova leave, he goes decent.
"You did good out there," he says, dropping into the chair across from me. "Man had a sheet."
"Does he."
"Two priors. Battery and a sex offense in Whitmore County. He won't be out for a while."
I look at my wrapped hand. The knuckles have mostly stopped bleeding. They hurt in the clean, bright way that means nothing's broken, just torn up. I've had worse.
"Girl say anything to you?" Collins asks.
"Not much."
"She know the guy?"
"No. She was just at the wrong fire with the wrong people." I pause. "She's thirteen."
"I know how old she is."
"You going to put any of this in your report?"
Collins looks at me steadily. "Define any of this."
I meet his eyes. "I'm asking what version of tonight you're planning to file."
"Version where a minor was in the vicinity of a man who was subsequently detained for aggressive behavior." He picks up his pen. "Version where a bystander intervened before anything worse happened."
"Bystander."
"You got a problem with that word?"
No. I don't. Because the other word, the one where I put a man twice into a tree trunk because the way he had his arm around that kid made something cold and old and furious come alive in my chest, that word leads to paperwork I don't have the capacity for right now.
"No problem," I say.
Collins nods. Writes something. "You need a doctor for that hand?"
"I need sleep."
He almost smiles. "Yeah, well. Try not to beat anyone else up on your way home."
I stand, pull my jacket on.
At the door, Collins says: "You know who that woman is?"
I stop with my hand on the frame.
"Jessika Mills," he continues. Careful. Watching me. “Presley Mills' daughter.”
"I know who she is."
Silence.
"She came back three weeks ago," Collins says. "Presley had the stroke in August. She's staying at the ranch."
"I'm aware."
"Are you."
I turn enough to look at him over my shoulder. "Is there a point coming or are you just building atmosphere?"
Collins sets down his pen. "She testified against you."
"I know."
"Don't you think that's?—"
"What I think," I say carefully, "is that it's cold and late and my hand hurts and I'd like to go home."
A pause.
"All right," Collins says. "Go home, Grant."
I do.
My truck is a '09 F-250 with two hundred thousand miles and a heater that works when it feels like it. Tonight it feels like it, and I drive through the empty county roads with warm air coming off the vents and my torn-up hand on the wheel and Briar County dark and wet and quiet all around me.
I think about the moment I saw her.
I was expecting the mother. I knew who Nova was, I’d seen Jessika's truck at the ranch often enough over the past three weeks, noticed it the way you notice things in a county this small, filed the information in the back of my mind where I put things I don't want to look at directly.
Nova Mills. Thirteen. Dark curls. That particular teenage energy that's half fury and half terror and wears itself as armor.
I wasn't expecting the moment itself.
The door coming open. That tall, elegant woman in a damp jacket with rain in her curls and her dark eyes going first to her daughter, the relief hitting her so hard I could see it from across the room, that physical softening that people can't control, and then to me.
And I watched her recognize me.
Fourteen years.
She looks different. She looked, somehow, both more tired and more certain. Like the years had stripped away some softness but added something in its place, some quality of having survived things she didn't expect to survive and come out knowing something new about herself on the other side.
She's still the most strikingly beautiful woman I've ever been in a room with.
With her maple brown skin, and those dark curls I want running through my fingers.
I hate that that's still true.
I don't hate it the way I used to, that particular savage helpless anger of being nineteen years old and wanting something you can't have. Now it's just a fact I acknowledge and put back down. Like the scar through my eyebrow. Like the years. Factual. Not particularly useful.
She said thank you.
I didn't expect that either.
I drive past the turnoff for Route 12, past the salvage yard sleeping dark and wet in the field, past the garage with its locked overhead doors, and keep going another two miles out to the access road that leads to my place.
It's not much: a rented apartment house on two acres that used to be a farmhand's quarters for a property that was subdivided twenty years ago.
Four rooms. A wood stove that works better than the electric heat.
Enough distance from town that I can breathe.
There’s a guard dog woman downstairs from me that keeps telling me that I’m losing weight. She’s nice enough though and keeps to herself most days.
I park and sit in the truck for a minute.
In my chest, something is still running too fast.
It's not the fight. I've been in enough of those, before prison, during, after, that the adrenaline doesn't last the way it used to. It metabolizes faster now. Leaves just the soreness and the clarity and sometimes, when I'm tired, the old craving at the edge of everything like a waiting tide.
Not tonight. Tonight it's something else.
I keep seeing Nova's face through the trees. The way she went still when she realized someone had seen. The particular quality of frozen panic that children get when they've understood that something has gone wrong.
She reminded me of someone.
She reminded me of myself at that age, out on some back road in the dark, drunk on something I'd gotten from someone older, terrified and furious and too proud to ask for help.
I know what comes after that kind of night if nobody shows up.
I know what it costs.
I get out of the truck.
Inside, I peel off my jacket and go upstairs to the kitchen sink and unwrap my hand and run cold water over the knuckles until the last of the bleeding stops.
I wrap it clean with the first aid kit from under the sink, methodical, practiced, and lean on the counter and stare at the window above the sink and the dark wet, nothing outside it.
My sponsor would tell me to call someone.
My sponsor is also asleep, because it is twelve-forty in the morning.
I take out my phone and almost do it anyway.
Dave picks up for me. He always picks up.
That's what he said when he first gave me the number, six years ago, a church basement in Dalton, me three months clean and holding my life together with both hands: Any time, Grant. I mean that. Any hour. You call.
I don't call.
Not because I'm going to use. I'm not. Tonight isn't that kind of night, it’s not the chemical pressure, not the bone-deep ache that used to mean I was hours from a decision I couldn't undo.
It's the other kind of night. The kind where you're just, awake. Present. Feeling things you usually know better than to feel for longer than thirty seconds.
Jessika is at the ranch on Route 9.
Morgan's sister. Morgan's family.
Morgan, who I haven't spoken to in over eight months. Who drops out of contact for months at a time and then surfaces in ways that don't quite add up, a text from a number I don't recognize, a message passed through someone who knows someone who knows where I work.
Morgan, who I have never stopped worrying about.
Morgan, whose disappearance I have kept quiet about for reasons that made sense at the time and that I'm less certain about every year.
I put my phone down on the counter.
I should stay away from the Mills ranch.
Every intelligent, sober, self-aware thing in me knows this.
I've built something here, not much, but something.
The garage. The meetings. The two guys I sponsor, both fighting as hard as I was six years ago, both needing someone to show up.
My nephew Eli, seventeen and making the same stupid choices I made at his age, needing someone to tell him the truth about where those choices lead.
I have a life here. A small one. A quiet one. One I assembled carefully from the wreckage of everything that came before.
Jessika Mills is in Briar County and she's in trouble and her daughter nearly didn't come home tonight.
I put a paper towel over my hand and go to bed.
I don't sleep for a long time.
Outside my window, Briar County is dark and wet and full of the things we bury out here, the history, the old business, the names we don't say at dinner tables and the stories that changed shape every time they got told until nobody remembers what actually happened.
I know what happened.
That's the part that has always cost me the most.