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would have. But the thing about words: once spoken, they’re poker chips on a table,
     there for the taking. Odds are somebody’s going to cash them in.
    She tipped her head, smiling softly. “Thank you, Mr. Bradbury.” She reached out and hugged him, just like that, letting her
     cheek brush against his, then turned and strode quickly back down his driveway and across the road. He stood there while she
     tried to start her banged-up little Ford, which finally kicked in with a rattle-roar on the third try. Feebly returning her
     wave, he watched as the car chugged away.

6
    S IDNEY’S BOSS leaned over her shoulder, perusing one of her files for some information he needed before returning a client’s phone call.
     Leon Schuman was an intensely serious man, no good at small talk, with a deeply lined face that was hard to read. She prayed
     he wouldn’t notice the stack of insurance quote requests piled to the left of her computer as she casually covered it with
     a notebook, breathing a sigh of relief when he closed the file and returned to his glassed-in office. Pushing the notebook
     aside, she covered a yawn and began to enter data into her computer. Her eyes watered from the yawn. It had been a long and
     sleepless night.
    As far as she knew, Micki was the only other employee at the Leon Schuman Insurance office that knew Sidney’s son was on the
     run. Sure, the others knew about Ty’s initial arrest, even though the paper had not stated his name because he was a juvenile.
     Word, distorted as it was, got around in Ham Bone, long before the weekly paper hit the porch steps. But her coworkers seemed
     to assume that Ty was either still at home or at school per the judge’s mandate, awaiting his fact-finding hearing. Most of
     them politely avoided the topic, sensing that Sidney was a little sensitive about it, though surely her private family business
     was being discussed in whispers between donuts and sips of coffee in the break room when she wasn’t there.
    She remembered ruefully how Ty’s court-appointed attorney, a pale, pregnant woman in her early thirties, had warned him of
     the absolute urgency of adhering to every rule set by the judge who had mercifully released him into his mother’s custody
     after the incident—without bail. She warned him that the consequences of breaking the court orders would be severe. Ty had
     nodded gravely without taking his eyes off her face.
    Sidney contemplated the framed photo on her desk, one that Jack Mellon had taken of a twelve-year-old Ty holding a remote
     control and gazing with wonder into the sky. The red model biplane, which Jack had painstakingly built and painted, was out
     of the picture. The very fact that the man had focused the camera on Tyson rather than on his masterpiece should have been
     a sign to her. Where had her head been back then? Where would Ty be today if she had married Jack? Certainly not on the streets
     or in the tangled woods living on blackberries and tree roots. She pictured Ty the way he could have been if he had a strong
     man to guide him—safe and content, flourishing in school, proudly displaying his own model airplane at the science fair. She
     forced her eyes back to the computer screen.
    Micki finally saved her from the pandemonium in her mind. “Hey.” Her friend’s blond head appeared at the top of her cubicle.
     “Let’s do lunch.”
    Sidney blinked. She hadn’t accomplished a complete task all morning that she could remember. She saved the work on her computer
     with a click. “Okay. Good idea.”
    It had been a beautiful September so far, but today autumn hovered in a chilly fog. The usual view of evergreen-covered foothills
     and the Cascade Mountains was shrouded with gray. They grabbed their jackets and walked to the little Mexican restaurant next
     door to their office—like many of the businesses in town, a home remodeled into retail space when commercial zoning was extended
     to the end of Center Street,