Then Finn's in the courtyard waiting, and I know before the truck stops.
I read it off his body, the way I read everything now.
Phone in his hand, shoulders sitting wrong, and he isn't watching the truck, he's watching the gravel, and when I climb out he comes straight at me and doesn't slow.
"My mother called."
I've got the dress in a bag on my arm and I set it down on the ground.
"Somebody's been on her street. A car she doesn't know, twice this week, parked and sitting." His voice comes flat and fast. "A call to her landline yesterday, nobody there when she picked up. And this morning a man knocked with a clipboard, said he was running a survey, and he had her name wrong. He called her by a name she hasn't used since before I was born. Her maiden name. The one off the certificate."
The certificate.
The one with a town in Mexico written in the corner of it.
"Finn."
"I know."
"They don't do all that unless?—"
"Iknow." He's already turning for the office. "Come with me. I need Amara, and I need you, and I need it now, because nobody sits on a street for a week and then knocks. They knock when they've already made up their minds."
Amara doesn't lose a second.
She's out of her chair before Finn finishes, phone in her hand, saying names into it I don't know.
Finn stands in the middle of her office, opening and closing his hands at his sides, and I've never seen him like this.
I've seen him wrecked. I've seen him go dead silent.
I’ve never once seen him afraid, and it's all pointed at her, at a woman two thousand miles north in a house on a street with a car parked outside it.
"She flies out of Tucson," Amara's saying. "Not Phoenix. Tucson's closer, it's smaller, I've got a man who can meet her there. One bag. Passport and nothing that has to be mailed or forwarded, nothing that leaves a trail. She tells no neighbor. She doesn't stop the mail." She looks at Finn. "She got money?"
"I'll send it tonight."
"Send it to my man, not to her. Her account's a trail too." She's writing as she talks. "If she moves tonight, she's here in two days. Can she move tonight?"
Finn's already got the phone up.
"Mom." His voice splits on the word and he hauls it back level. "Mom, listen to me. I need you to do something, and I need you not to argue with me about it. Okay? I need you to pack a bag."
I stand against the wall and I watch him.
I watch him tell his mother to walk out of her house.
To leave the town she's lived in since the divorce and the house she keeps spotless, and the whole quiet life she built back up out of the one Ironwood already burned down.
He emphasizes to do it tonight, in the dark, without telling one living soul, because her son says she has to.
He's standing in his president's office with tears standing on his face, deciding his mother's entire life inside a phone call, lifting the choice clean out of her hands, and he's doing it because he loves her and because they're already coming and because there's no time.
I know precisely what it's taking out of him. I know exactly why. And I can't get angry.
That's what I can't get around, flat against that wall.
Ten years ago he did this to me.
