Page 131 of Rhodes

I lean back and stare at the ceiling of the old porch, following the lines of the beadboard. There must be twenty coats of paint on it.

The light is almost gone by the time Reeves stands. He gathers both empty bottles and drops them into the cardboard carrier.

"I'll be here Tuesday before work." He gets down two steps, then turns back. "For what it's worth, my feelings about Vin are complicated, too. But I wasn't going to let him spend twenty years rotting in that room because Ridge and Wells decided that was worse than dying."

Then he turns around, takes the last four steps two at a time. The gate clicks shut behind him, and his Hummer starts on the street. I stay where I am until the sound fades.

Inside, I leave the chandelier off and turn on the lamp beside the front parlor sofa. One bulb catches the edge of the old molding and leaves most of the room dark.

I go down the stairs to the bunker. It doesn't look temporary anymore.

My shoes are under the bench by the bedroom door. My razor is beside the sink, and there are shirts hanging in the closet now instead of folded into two duffels on the floor.

I open the dresser looking for nothing. Her Columbia shirt she wears when she works on the boat is in the bottom drawer. I found it when I unpacked weeks ago, mixed in with my things from Audubon. The faded blue cotton, tattered white logo above the front pocket, is folded perfectly.

Could have returned it, but I didn't. I pick it up now and run my thumb over the lettering.

What comes first isn't how I held her while withholding what I did to cause it. It's her mouth at my throat in a dark room, and the sound she makes when I get a hand under whatever she's wearing. I'm hard before I've finished the thought, and I’m disgusted with myself.

Tallulah stood in my kitchen crying because her father didn't believe her, and I decided the truth would hurt her worse than the lie. I understand how much that hurt her more than I have at any point before.

I turn off the lamp and walk into the bathroom to shower.

THIRTY

Tilly

The Preservation Easement: A restriction recorded against the property itself, binding every owner who comes after. A family signs one only when it has finally agreed that what stands there matters more than what the ground could bring.

A mosquito lands on my neck, and I smack the hell out of it. I pull my hand back to be sure I got him, and the blood on my palm confirms my success. I smear it on my shorts.

Around me, the mud stretches gray and slick to the water, the tide pulled all the way out, oyster rakes standing up in clusters where the current keeps them fed.

Marion, the delineator Grandbank hired out of Beaufort after Dell Ravenel gave him three names, moves ahead of me in her chest waders. She has a GPS unit held out in front of her like a divining rod, reading the screen and then the ground and then the screen again.

Ten feet behind, her field tech pushes another pink flag into the mud, the wire staff sinking easily, the plastic snapping in the hot breeze off the water.

I pull my right boot free with a wet pop and take two steps to catch up. My left goes in past the ankle. I lean, twist, break the suction, and keep moving. You don't fight pluff mud straight up unless you're okay losing a shoe or cutting yourself on an oyster bed. You roll your foot and let it give you back.

"I want the next one there," Marion says, pointing at a low hummock where the cordgrass thins.

"That's not it."

She looks over.

"The spartina line runs behind that hummock, not across it." I point past her hand, to where the green blades actually start standing thick and even. "That hummock's been undercut. It'll be gone in two seasons. You flag the live edge, not the stuff that's already dead and doesn't know it."

Marion checks her screen. Then she walks the six feet, crouches, and looks at the root mat where I told her to look. She stands.

"You're right."

She calls the flag back and moves it herself. The tech resets his staff.

We work north up the bank, and I keep reading it against the map I've carried in my head since I was in the womb. Marion moves to plant another at a rake cluster.

"Behind the rakes." I don't soften it. "The bed's holding sediment there. Real edge is a good yard back."

She checks it, and whatever she finds down in the root mat settles it, because she moves the flag without another word.