The Stillwater Girls(20)

“I’ll check on you every day,” he says. “And I’ll have my phone on me the whole time.”

Is he overcompensating? Reminding me that he’s available by phone, night or day, because he feels guilty about whatever it is he’s hiding?

“I’ll be fine.” I rise from the bed, sliding my hands in the back pockets of my jeans and mustering a smile.

Brant slides his bag off the bed and wheels it to the doorway of our master suite before checking his phone—the same one he inexplicably locked me out of this week—and then he puts it away.

“My ride’s two minutes away,” he says. Our eyes catch. There’s worry in his squint and in the hard lines on his forehead—I just can’t distinguish if it’s for me or for himself.

I follow him to the landing at the bottom of the stairs, and he props his bag by the door before turning to me.

“I’m going to miss you,” he says, brushing a strand of hair from my forehead.

“Me too.” I say it back but only because I need to keep up appearances.

Brant angles my mouth toward his, his fingers gently pushing the underside of my chin, and then he kisses me again, harder and greedier than usual.

His phone dings in his pocket, and from my peripheral vision, I spot a black sedan pulling into the driveway.

“Your ride’s here,” I say, backing away.

Brant massages his lips together, surveying me for a moment, but I pat his chest with the palm of my hand and step aside.

“Be safe,” I tell him, as I always do. My husband twists the knob on the front door, and I kiss the pads of my fingertips before giving him a wave.

“Oh, Brant?” I ask.

“Yes?” He turns back to me.

“Forgot to tell you . . . there was a fraud alert on my trust account,” I say, brows meeting. I specifically waited until this moment, until he’d be on his way out of the country so he wouldn’t have a chance to cover his tracks. “I told them just to freeze it until we can figure out what’s going on.”

“Hm.” His Adam’s apple bobs, and his tan complexion whitens for a hair of a second. “That’s . . . concerning. I’ll look into it when I get back. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

He lingers in the doorway but only for a moment, and then he’s gone.





CHAPTER 15

WREN

“Eat up, girls,” the stranger says, peeling a strip of goat’s meat from a rib. “Waste not, want not.”

Mama always says that.

The overpowering scent of the charred meat on my plate fills my nostrils. I’ve yet to take a bite, but I already know all the spices in the cupboard aren’t going to make us forget what we’re about to eat is one of our favorite goats.

Sage threw up when we were preparing the food earlier.

She looked outside at the blood and pelt lying in the brown grass, where he’d shot one of them earlier today, and it got to her. She loved those goats the way we all loved the little collie dog we once had before he ran away.

I begged the man not to kill the goats this morning, but he grabbed our shotgun and marched outside, slamming the door behind him.

The sound of the blast rang through the cabin, clattering the windows, and my sister and I held each other until he came back in a blood-spattered jacket to dig a hunting knife from his bag.

“I’ll be damned if I eat eggs and potatoes for every damn meal,” he’d said with a huff.

Picking at the meat on my plate, I tear off a chunk. The warm, heady scent fills my nostrils, and I slide the piece into my mouth. The taste is stronger than chicken, and the texture is firm, chewy almost.

Elbowing Sage, I whisper, “Eat.”

If the poor goat is already dead, we might as well eat it. It’d be a shame if it died for the sole purpose of feeding the stranger.

I’m still not sure what he’s doing here—all I’ve gathered at this point is that he knows who Mama is . . . but he won’t tell us how or why he’s looking for her.

“You two always lived here?” he asks, picking a piece of meat from between his teeth and making a sucking noise.

“Yes,” I say, though I neglect to tell him that I’ve had these memories fill my head sometimes, memories of living in a house with flowered paper on the walls and fuzzy soft floors that tickled my feet when I ran across them.

Mama said it was probably a “false memory,” maybe something I picked up from one of those books I always kept my nose in.

I could never understand; if those memories were false, then why’d they feel so real?

“So let me get this straight,” he says, sitting up and pointing his fork at us. “You’ve lived here, in this cabin, your entire lives?”

I nod.

“You ever go to school?” he asks. “With other kids? To learn?”

We look at each other before shaking our heads. Mama said schools weren’t safe anymore, that there were parents who sent their kids off to school in the morning, never to see them again.

“We had lessons,” I say.

“Lessons?” he asks.

“Reading, writing, addition, and subtraction,” I say. “Sometimes history or geography.”

History always made Mama sad, though, and I realized once that she was giving us a condensed version of events when I was paging through one of her books on social injustices and stumbled across an entry for a man by the name of Martin Luther King Jr.; I read about his fight for peace and equality and how he was killed for it.