Page 54

She reads it at the table across from me. All of it. I watch her.

She reaches the page where I wrote down taking her phone at six-nineteen and powering it off a minute later. Locking the door. Hearing her through the wall. Sitting in the hall. Watching her work the screen rivets through the window at five in the morning and knowing that if she got it open, I would stand where the bullet would come from, and knowing also that I would put her back inside after.

Her face doesn’t change. The kitchen clock moves eleven minutes.

She reads the tank. The road. Tomas Reyes and his twelve lost hours and his baby at home. The false return date. Two years of hiding a clipboard behind a drawer.

When she finishes, she checks the signature on the last page and sets it beside her own account of the captivity. Not on top of it. Beside it.

“You wrote that you liked it,” she says. “Knowing where I was.”

“Yes.”

“That’s in a legal document.”

“It’s true. I wasn’t going to leave out the ugliest part just because it’s the part that’s about you.”

She looks at me.

“Garrett’s review may take me off the ranch,” I say. “If it does, I’ll take it. I won’t ask you to argue that I’m useful, or hurt, or honest now, or better than Russell.”

“Would you leave?”

“If that’s the decision, yes.”

“Even if Russell calls it proof you betrayed the family?”

“Russell’s idea of family was that I had to lie to keep my place in it. I’m done paying that.”

The house is quiet. The refrigerator. A truck passing on the county road. A hinge settling somewhere behind us.

“I won’t be your character witness because we’ve had sex,” she says.

“You shouldn’t be.”

She stands. She carries both accounts into her spare room and locks them in a case. When she comes back her hands are empty.

She walks down her own hall and opens the back door wide, so I can see the dark yard behind it. Then she walks back without touching either lock.

“Both doors are mine,” she says.

“Yes.”

“So is what happens next.”

“Why did you write it all?” she asks. “Your lawyer would have told you to say less.”

“He did.”

“Then why?”

I look at her across her own kitchen. “Because Warren talked for a year and never once wrote down what he did. Because Russell never wrote down anything. I grew up around men who kept the truth in their heads where they could change it.” I stop. “I didn’t want there to be one version of me for you and another one for the county. I wanted there to be one. Even if it’s the bad one.”

She’s quiet.

“It isn’t only the bad one,” she says. “Page thirty-one. You wrote that you sat in the hall so the first thing through the front door would have to go through you.”

“That doesn’t make up for anything.”