On the night Trumanell disappeared, I used them together for the last time—to run for my life.

Wyatt and I were supposed to play a game of Scrabble on the night of June 7, 2005—our forty-sixth date, which I’d been marking off on a calendar. I think about that all the time—how ordinary it is in the polite South to walk into somebody else’s house, with secrets and monsters you know all about, and trust that the biggest argument while you’re there will be over whether thanx is now a legit word on the Scrabble board or if this is the best lemon pound cake you’ve ever put in your mouth.

I never made it inside that night. Wyatt cracked open his front door when I knocked and told me to run, to not ask questions. I saw panic on his face and a dark sedan in the shadows of the driveway.

I heard no screams, no gunshots. The air was fat and ugly—either the prelude to something terrible or the afterlude of it. As soon as I jumped back in my car, I tried to call my father, but the service was terrible out on that stretch of land.

An hour later, two miles away, a man found my pickup, flipped in a ditch, my leg crushed, radio slurring, blood watering the grass.

I think Wyatt saved me that night by telling me to run. He thinks he broke me. He certainly broke himself.

While a surgeon carved on my leg, Wyatt was found wandering around the lake, out of his mind, speaking gibberish. People said that fact, and a few smears of blood out at the house, were clear signs that Trumanell and Frank Branson were both dead, and that Wyatt did it. But they couldn’t prove anything.

How could he have gotten rid of two bodies and cleaned up in such a short amount of time? Why would he kill Trumanell, the sister he adored? That’s what my father always asked, ever polite, when people called our house for years, complaining, saying he had to know something because he was first on the scene and his daughter, bless her heart, is the one who fled it.

My father always had a way of twisting the end of the conversation to a pleasant agreement: Wyatt was the trickiest running back in town history, and Frank Branson was a son of a bitch. It was impossible to argue with either.

My grandmother’s two words for my dad were True North, although I think she was wrong. My father’s compass could point any direction.

Ten years later, Wyatt is still free, still tricky, and resolutely silent. Frank Branson is still out there somewhere, tainting the earth one way or another.

I pull on the sock. Pull the uniform leg down. They say I’m lucky because the amputation is below the left knee, not above it. I wonder if someone told this girl she’s lucky she only lost one eye, not two.

This girl, whoever she is, unsettles me. It’s not the emptiness of the missing eye, but the one working so hard to give nothing away. Her story is not going to be simple. She will not make this easy.

Wyatt’s rubbing his arm again.

I abruptly rise, slinging the girl into my arms.

“Odette?”

“We’re going. Don’t leave the house until I get back here. If you do, you limit my choices.”

“She can walk as well as you can,” Wyatt is saying. “Don’t let her fool you.”

It’s killing him not to help me carry her. I kick open the screen door and slide her into the backseat. Wyatt, standing on the porch, is a lanky stain against all that white. I wait two miles past the cattle gate before I hit the brakes and breathe.

I didn’t call in a possible kidnapping or missing person. I didn’t radio ahead to the hospital so the girl could be checked out. I didn’t take any evidence out of Wyatt’s house or truck. I didn’t lock up anything as a possible crime scene.

I have no idea how life will spool forward if I don’t turn this girl in, but I know exactly how it will if I do. The town will finally strap Wyatt Branson to a pyre and drop a match. People will say that it was to be expected, that it is the ten-year anniversary, for God’s sake, that even if this girl is the first after Trumanell, even if Wyatt didn’t touch her, he could be escalating. He talks to a ghost.

Wyatt will finally end up on trial for Trumanell, or back in another mental facility. He has told me if that happens again, he’ll kill himself. He already tried once, a fishing knife to his wrist, sitting on the cushion where Angel had propped her feet two minutes ago. He told me it was Trumanell who convinced him to wait.

And this girl—she’ll be dumped in the system, forever the One-Eyed Girl who survived the infamous Wyatt Branson.

After the cameras go away, her past will know right where to look for her. A pimp, a druggie mother, a foster mom using her to bleed money out of the system, a sex trafficker running teenagers over the border, a thousand other kinds of hunters unimaginable to me until girls and boys open their mouths and tell their stories.

I pick my cellphone off the seat and dial.

Four rings.

“I have a girl,” I say. “I’ll see you soon.”

The girl stays silent. So do I. I turn down the police radio, set the timer on my phone to ten minutes, and settle in, making it clear the car is not moving. I wiggle my rearview mirror so I have a good view of her stretched out in the backseat.

At five minutes, she’s sitting up.

At six minutes, she’s inching over, running her hand over a door with no handle. At seven minutes, she tries the other side. At eight minutes, she’s sipping the bottle of water from the cup holder as if she has all the time in the world to sit with a cop and gaze out the window at a cow chewing on cud.

I’m developing a healthy respect for her. She has patience. She’s going to be shrewder than most girls who end up in my backseat.

I think she’s skinny, like I used to be, not underfed, and that the wiry muscle in her legs means she’s probably fast. She’s at least thirteen, maybe a little older. I don’t think Wyatt hurt her. She never cringed from him. She cringed from an invisible Trumanell.

At ten minutes, I say, “Silence is a powerful thing. I get why you use it. I need a little help here before we go further. Did Wyatt touch you? Hurt you? Nod or shake your head. I want the truth. I will act on whatever you say. I will protect you. I promise.”

No movement from the backseat.

My hands tighten on the wheel. “OK, then. Here’s how this is going to work. For the next forty-eight hours, you can keep right on being silent. You can use that time to decide whether to trust me. I’m going to treat you like I would any scared runaway who ends up in my car. I’m going to feed you, clothe you, hide you. You will not rob the people who help you for the next forty-eight hours. You will be respectful. You will not disappear. In return, within forty-eight hours, you’re going to talk to me, tell me who you are and what happened. And I’ll decide what’s next. You will have a voice in that decision if you choose to use it. All bets are off if I find you in the system as a missing person with legitimate parents or family looking for you.”

I shift into drive and begin to crawl forward, committing to my decision. I keep up the patter.

“There’s a truck stop five miles from here where a CSI van sets up in the parking lot once a month. Girls line up to show their ID and get their cheeks swabbed. In exchange, they get four tamales or a cheeseburger, a Dr Pepper, and no questions asked. That’s because even these girls agree it’s a good idea for DNA to be on file so their bones can be identified. Everybody is betting—the cops, the scientists, the girls themselves—that their luck will run out. The fact that Wyatt Branson was the trucker who picked you up is probably the biggest piece of luck you will ever get. But not everyone would think that, and it could get him in trouble. If anyone asks, you haven’t met him. I found you on that highway.”

No acknowledgment. No smile or agreement. No sign of relief, hope, cynicism.

Round One to the girl in the backseat. Most of the girls who wind up there have talked by now—have asked me to tell them about the skin-colored leg with painted toenails they glimpsed in the trunk when I pulled out a blanket for them, to stop at McDonald’s for a cheeseburger or CVS for a pregnancy test, to give them fifty bucks for a night at a motel and pull away. I’ve done all those things at one time or another.

A sisterhood of three Mexican girls who sat back there licking vanilla ice cream cones once told me they had no names. They called themselves the Hadas de la Carretera. Fairies of the Highway. These girls believed their lives had more power, more meaning, if their identities were melted into myth and one another—the girls whose bones will never be found, and the ones not even born yet, who will walk the highways in their echo.

It will never end. That’s what they told me as vanilla ice cream dripped on their chins. My husband and the brave, cynical girls of my backseat would get along.