Josephine

Julian's car pulled in eleven minutes before Mara worked up the nerve to go inside, which she chose to take, privately, as a sign, because by now she had learned that when you are doing something unreasonable, you take your signs where you find them.

He didn't say much. He just stood beside her at the door, close enough that she could feel the specific steadiness of a person who has decided, without being asked, to be a wall at your back instead of a voice in your ear, and that turned out to be exactly the thing she needed.

Josephine Hargrove was maybe thirty-eight, dark-haired, moved with a slight, permanent hitch in her left leg that she'd clearly stopped apologizing for decades ago. She looked at Mara for a long moment in the practice's front hallway, between clients, a stopwatch still looped around her wrist.

"You have her exact chin," Josephine said. Which was, Mara thought, becoming less a coincidence and more a kind of family curse.

"I'm Carol Vance's daughter. There's a letter—"

"I know who you are. I've known who you were going to be since I was seven years old and your mother sat with me at St. Mary's until three in the morning, holding my hand so tight I had the bruise for a week, telling me over and over that it wasn't my fault, that dogs get loose, that some Tuesdays just go wrong for no reason anybody deserves." Josephine's voice didn't shake. It had clearly practiced not shaking, a long time ago, for exactly this kind of conversation. "She sent money every single month until the day she died. Anonymous, except it was never really anonymous, not in a town the size of Larkspur. Paid for two surgeries and every physical therapy session that got me walking well enough to become the person who does this for other kids now."

"She never told you the truth. That it was her dog. That she was the one who let it off the leash."

"No," Josephine said. "She never did." She took the letter from Mara's hand at last, held it without opening it, the way a person holds something they've been braced for their whole adult life and still aren't quite ready to feel. "I always sort of knew anyway. Small towns don't keep secrets. They just agree, collectively, not to say them out loud."