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Then he said, “I’m still angry.”

Margaret nodded. “You should be.”

“But I’m not leaving because I’m angry.”

She looked up.

“I’m going because if Emily is alive, and sober, and trying, then the children deserve truth from more than one direction.”

Margaret’s eyes filled.

“You sound like your father when he’d already decided and didn’t need anyone’s permission.”

Daniel almost smiled. “That’s not entirely a compliment.”

“No,” she said softly. “It usually isn’t.”

Savannah was four hours away.

Daniel drove them alone in a silence full of old roads. Pine trees. Gas stations. Billboards. The Atlantic smell starting to edge into the air long before the city properly arrived. He had called ahead using the number from Emily’s most recent letter. A woman at a recovery center on the east side had answered. Then Emily herself.

He had recognized her voice before she said her name.

There was gravel in it now. Not age, exactly. Experience.

They met in a coffee shop across from the river.

Emily came in wearing plain jeans, a white T-shirt under a thrifted cardigan, and no makeup except whatever exhaustion and recovery had written into the shape of her face. She looked older than thirty. So did he. Life had not handled either of them delicately.

For a second they simply stared.

Then Emily laughed once, short and disbelieving, and covered her mouth.

“You came back expensive too,” she said.

He actually smiled. “That seems to be going around.”

The first fifteen minutes were clumsy. Coffee ordered and barely touched. Weather remarked upon with embarrassing determination. Eyes avoiding eyes.

Then Emily said, “Do they hate me?”

The question was so naked it stripped the room of politeness.

Daniel answered honestly. “They don’t know enough yet to hate anybody.”

Her eyes closed briefly. “That sounds fair.”

He studied her. “Why didn’t you tell me before I left?”

She looked down at her cup. “I found out three days before your flight.” A pause. “I tried to tell you twice. The first time you were already halfway out the door in your head. The second time you said if one more person asked you to stay in Macon, you’d lose your mind.”

Shame went through him like heat.

He remembered.

Not the exact sentence maybe, but the spirit of it. The fury. The desperation. The way poverty had made him mean to anything that sounded like an anchor.

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