I’ve eased my gun out and am waving him over. “I don’t know what is going on, Wyatt, but you need to stand over there. By Mama Pat’s blue chair. Near the picture of Lila.”

Lila, as sharply pretty and tragic as always, has been the only photograph in this room since I can remember. I was sixteen when Wyatt first told me Lila’s story, an age when I found her fate more poetic than gruesome. I mused about whether there was a reason she chose a red ribbon to hang herself and not blue or yellow or green. Later, I thought about the physics of it, why the ribbon didn’t snap before it could break her neck.

A year ago, I convinced Wyatt to take Lila off the wall and remove the back of the frame. The pencil scratch on the back of her photograph said her name was Alice Doling, and there are no Dolings in the Branson line. Frank Branson got her out of a secondhand bin and transformed her into one of his big fat lies.

And yet, Wyatt hung her back in place. She is still the silent, constant witness to what goes on in this house, while Trumanell’s face is conspicuously absent.

Wyatt hasn’t edged any closer to the staircase.

The living room walls are starting to hum, snapping into focus. Little pieces of paper with Wyatt’s bold, slanted handwriting are taped here and there—Trumanell’s bits of wisdom whispered to him daily.

There is more quote clutter every time I step across this threshold. I wait for the day an ivy of Trumanellisms will creep over the tables and chairs and floor, up the stairs, out the windows.

My eyes are darting from the girl to Wyatt to Lila. If it was anybody but Wyatt, I would have snapped on handcuffs as soon as I saw the girl on the couch. I would have alerted my partner. I wouldn’t be the lone cop standing in this room right now, trying to make a call.

There’s so much history. So much guilt.

And, of course, my big mistake. Three weeks and two days ago. It’s why Wyatt is standing here with all the power while I’m the one pointing the gun.

The excuse-making part of me says that if cellphones didn’t exist, if Finn had opened his arms and told me to get in bed that night, if Deal or No Deal hadn’t been at such a high fever pitch that a husband of sixty-four years had to ask his wife seven times to turn it down, if Texas didn’t boil every fucking piece of reason out of the air—I wouldn’t have gone to the bar.

I wouldn’t have downed five shots of tequila.

Wyatt wouldn’t have risen out of the corner booth in the back and brushed the edge of my bare shoulder on the way out.

An accident? On purpose?

Did it matter that it had already been a day of bad romance?

That at 6 A.M., my partner and I had been summoned to a house where a husband had beaten his wife unconscious for checking her cellphone during sex?

That a few hours later, I was sliding the gun from the trembling hand of an eighty-seven-year-old man whose spouse was still upright on her faded couch, confused why her shoulder had a bullet hole in it?

My partner and I turned down the TV and temped that living room at 100 degrees, while pretty girls on TV opened briefcases with prize money no one would win.

When I finally got home, I wanted to retreat to the coldest place on the planet or at least my husband’s arms. It turned out, those were the same things.

“I never knew you to be surprised at the vile nature of human beings,” Finn had said from the bed, while he watched me strip off my uniform. “We kill indiscriminately, always have, always will. People we love, people we don’t know, sisters, brothers, wives, children, best friends, neighbors, rats, snakes. We kill for fun out of car windows and deer blinds, for fifteen minutes of fame, because a bumper sticker says Zero Percent Republican, because the TV is too fucking loud. I’d say tomorrow will be different, but it will be the same.” He turned over and closed his eyes.

Finn’s a good guy. I married him, first and foremost, because he couldn’t lie without the vein in his forehead popping. So he never lied.

It’s not that he was wrong. But at that moment, I didn’t want to hear life was hopeless. I didn’t want a lecture from a clear-eyed lawyer who also had a rotten day.

So I went to the bar.

Wyatt brushed by.

I grabbed his arm right as he opened his pickup door.

The second Wyatt entered me in that parking lot was a welcome shot of pain, long overdue.

Now Wyatt is massaging that same arm I grabbed, the one his father broke when he was ten by pushing him off a tractor. He says that arm has told him things ever since.

The rubbing means he’s bothered. There’s so much I know about Wyatt that I wish I didn’t. So many reasons I think he’s innocent even with a strange girl trembling on his couch and acid rolling in my gut.

“I found her lying off the highway,” he’s saying. “She was wishing on dandelions, probably for someone to pick her up. It’s as simple as that. I have no idea how she got there. I think maybe she’s running.”

The girl whips her head up at his last sentence. That’s when I see the drooped lid, the squint, the flash of bloodshot red. I work hard to control the muscles of my mouth, keeping my own eyes blank and unsurprised, because that’s what I’d want.

My heart is suddenly so quiet I wonder if it’s beating. I tighten my grip on the gun, keeping it focused on Wyatt. I turn to the girl. “It’s going to be OK, honey. What’s your name?”

“Good luck on that,” Wyatt says. “She hasn’t said a word. I’m calling her Angel.”

“Wyatt. Over by Lila.”

“Come on, Odette.” He takes a step, tightening up on me. “You aren’t going to shoot me. There’s nothing here that can’t be settled without a gun. And you know what they’ll do if you call this in. I’ll be staring at metal bars. It will kick stuff up that’s just now settled down after that piece of shit TV documentary about True.”

The girl’s hair straggles to her thin shoulders. No shoes. Why didn’t he call this in right away? Did he touch her? I need to think all the things I’d think if this was someone I didn’t know.

“I’m taking her.” I strain to keep my cop voice.

“You can’t dump her in the system.”

“I’ll find out where she belongs. That’s my job.”

“Does she look like she belongs to somebody good? Are you going to be the girl I know today? Or a cop like all the rest? She needs that eye fixed. You think social services will jump on that? You throw her in the system and kids will tear her apart. Popeye. Evil Eye. Blackbeard. My daddy got called everything in the book.”

Stop. Talking. I blink back the imagery of Frank Branson’s eyes, one empty and brown, the other a treacherous piece of blue ice. He deserved every name he was called.

He could have afforded a prosthesis that matched the color of the other eye, that fit better, that didn’t roll around, that didn’t come out of some quack’s drawer of eyeballs, only a grade above a cheap marble collection. Wyatt’s father, though, was a twisted piece of work.

He once convinced Wyatt, at age four, while sitting across from him in a Dairy Queen booth, that he was a figment of Wyatt’s imagination—all because a waitress brought Wyatt his strawberry milkshake but forgot to bring his father’s.

Frank Branson used and reveled in the raw material presented to him.

Angel is raw material.

Wyatt is his son.

Wyatt claims he picked up this girl with one eye, sitting in a bed of dandelions. Wyatt hates dandelions, killing them across his property with a vengeance that bordered on obsession. He hated his daddy. He hates this town. Sometimes he even hates me.

“Where’s Trumanell?” I ask.

“Right there. Sitting on the stairs.”

The girl’s breath catches, an animal squeak, the first sound I’ve heard from her.

I rip my glance from the staircase. That was a mistake, asking Wyatt about Trumanell. I need to hold the girl in the normal. Hold Wyatt in the normal.

“Show her that you have something in common,” Wyatt orders. “I’ll give her up easy, carry her to your car, if you show her you’ve lost something, too. That you’re not like all the rest. I’m trusting you, Odette. Not to be like all the rest.”

The girl is straightening up, assessing us, her eye on my gun. Wyatt’s not facing the wall like I want, but he’s compromising, hands in the air, like a cat baring his belly to a big dog, knowing he’s still in charge.

“Are you going to show her or not?” he asks.

I stare at him for a few long seconds. I holster the gun.

I drop beside her on the couch and offer a reassuring smile. I prop out my left leg and tug up the stiff fabric of my uniform. I strip off the sleeve. The sock.

Angel reaches over and runs a finger down, not saying a word.

It shouldn’t make me shiver, her flesh on my metal, but it does.

7

At sixteen, I had two flesh-and-blood legs. I used to throw them around Wyatt’s waist while we stared up at the black universe, the moon a big shiny dime, lovers in the bed of a truck.