Two Cars Converging

Rochester was four hours from Larkspur, which gave Mara plenty of time to compose speeches she abandoned one after another, somewhere around the county line each time, because none of them sounded like something a real person would say to a woman she was about to reopen thirty-one years for.

Julian texted updates from the road like a man narrating his own arrival for an audience of one: Two hours out. Bought gas station flowers, immediately regretted it, kept them anyway. Grandpa says tell you the stars look the same from Minnesota, which is either sweet or the least useful fact a physicist has ever offered a woman in crisis.

Mara found Josephine Hargrove's address without much trouble — a physical therapy practice on the edge of town, JH REHABILITATION AND WELLNESS painted in tidy gold letters, which told Mara something before she'd even parked the car. Whatever the accident had taken, Josephine Hargrove had apparently spent thirty-one years turning it into other people's second chances at walking.

She sat in the parking lot the way she'd sat outside Edwin's house, outside her mother's grave, outside every threshold this whole strange errand had asked her to cross, and understood that this particular hesitation was not fear of a stranger's anger. It was fear of her own relief, if there turned out to be any waiting on the other side of that door. She wasn't sure she'd earned relief yet. She wasn't sure her mother ever had either.

Her phone buzzed. Julian: Forty minutes. You don't have to wait for me if you're ready. But I hope you do.

Mara put the letter in her coat pocket, the way she had for Ruth, for Edwin, for Dorothy dying by inches in Cheyenne, for every name in this box that had turned out to be a door.

She waited.