“I’ll get out of your hair. Don’t want to be interrupting your dinner.”
I move aside, let the door open wider. “We got plenty. Want to come in?”
I have known Sheriff Ryan all my life, and the man has neverchanged. He’s one of those men, like Steve Martin, whose hair went white early and then he didn’t age another day over the next forty years. Same horseshoe mustache, same dusty boots, same need to protect everyone. When I first moved in here a few weeks ago, he showed up with an armful of wooden dowels, started measuring my windows, cutting the dowels to size, and sliding them into the frame, so the windows couldn’t be slid open from the outside.
The house has a security system, I told him.
He just nodded and went about his work.
“Can’t,” he says now. “I’m on duty.”
“When are you ever off duty?”
He laughs.
Model homes are dangerous places to be at night, the sheriff has told me. Construction sites are a common target for thieves—all the tools and equipment, the brand-new appliances in this house, and the fancy furniture. No one expects anyone to be here after hours.
The truth is, I don’t want to be here either, but I have no choice.
Mark was the one who got me this position, a job showing the model off to prospective buyers, giving them a tour of the luxury Amenity Center, selling the idea of an enviable life. He talked the developer into letting me stay at the model, so long as I promised to keep things tidy, which I do. Every morning, I pack my things, even my toiletries, into a suitcase and slide it under the bed.
All Mark has ever wanted was for me to get back on my feet, and this is the fastest way to get there. The free rent means I can save up for a place of my own, a real place, one Olivia can visit without fake apples, where I can hang my own pictures on the wall, where she can throw her shoes and her bags on the ground, and maybe, just maybe Olivia will believe that I’ve laid anchor. Maybe she’ll believe I’m here to stay.
“You give me a call,” he says, “if you need anything at all. You know I won’t be far.” He puts his hat back on his head, tips it to Olivia, and heads back to his truck.
I lean against the doorframe to watch him leave.
The site is so loud during the day, the beep of the vehicles, the workers playing music and laughing, and all that banging. But at night, it’s dark and dead silent.
When I was a kid, this was all ranchland owned by the Shermans, acres and acres of scrubby grass, cows, and trees. Now the woods are being cleared, the earth overturned, releasing scorpions and displacing the animals. Coyotes and armadillos and deer make their way to the highway. It’s the talk of the town—accidents have been on the rise—just one in a long list of complaints.
The sheriff has started his truck, but he hasn’t left yet, and I realize he’s waiting for me to close the door, to lock myself and Olivia safely inside.
I take one last look down the street before I do just that. The place can be creepy at night. Despite acting like I don’t need his protection, it does give me peace of mind that the sheriff checks up on me. There are no lights but the moon, which elongates every shadow, the bulldozers and the backhoes like sleeping beasts, the bones of half-finished houses. From the milky darkness come the odd sounds of animals searching for a home that’s no longer there.
CHAPTER FOURINGRID
Five Days Before the Pageant
Show up for the big things.That’s what my husband, Joel, always says. And it says a lot about where things stand with us that he isn’t here with me now.
You can forget to text people back, cancel on happy hour, even blow off a birthday party every once in a while. But you show up for the big things—weddings, funerals, the births of babies. Because these are linchpin moments in a person’s life, moments when their identity shifts, when they become a new version of themselves, forever changed. And when you love someone, you show up to witness the change, to meet the new version so you can keep moving forward with them.
So that’s what I’m doing. I’m showing up. I’m coming back home to Anhalt, Texas.
When my plane landed, I had another text from Dad, asking one last time if I needed him to pick me up at the airport. But I’d already reserved a rental car, the exact same make and model that I own back in Colorado, because I don’t like driving a car I don’t know.
The drive from the Austin airport to Anhalt—about an hour west, along the Blanco River where the hills start to rise—is almostunrecognizable from the one I used to make years ago, after I first left home. Back then, the city fell away right after the airport—no Tesla factory, no Amazon facility, no cookie-cutter subdivisions yet. Just fields, mesquite, and sky. But every time I visit, the city has expanded, bleeding into the nearby towns—Buda, Kyle, even Dripping Springs—encroaching closer to our little rural community. As I pull into town, I pass under a banner for theFIFTIETH ANNUAL LONE STAR PRINCESS PAGEANT, strung between Herman Smith’s boot shop and a new Aveda hair salon where Timeless Treasures used to be. Back then, Mom dragged us there every Saturday, always on the hunt for something pretty to clutter up her already cluttered display cabinets. That’s where, on a whim, she bought me my first film camera, a 35mm Canon AE-1, which I used all through high school to snap photos of Izzy and me and all our friends.
The Dairy Queen is gone now too, where in the parking lot out back, Jimmy Marino tried to get to second base.Y’all might look the same, but you’re cuter than your sister, he had said as his hand slid up my shirt. It was exactly what I wanted him to think, but not what I wanted him to say. It’s a drive-through smoothie place now, touting acai bowls and fresh-pressed juices. They’ve repurposed the old DQ sign—the shape of something that once was, with something new plastered on top.
I hate coming back home. I hate seeing the things that have changed. And, probably even more, I hate the things that have stayed the same. Everything’s a trigger, memories come like buckshot, little pellets of remembering that burrow deep beneath my skin.
So I’ve found excuses to avoid it these last few years, and before that, my trips have always been short. A few days for Christmas or a cousin’s wedding. In and out.
And up until now, I’ve always had Joel by my side, a layer of protection, a separation between the person I was when I lived here and the person I am now.
Mom has kept me up to date on the town’s changes. But it’s stillodd to see. The woods have been dug up away from the narrow roads, streets widened, construction cones warning of the town’s hollowing.