Page 10 of One Last Promise

For a good reason.

But sometimes . . .

Breathe.

Farther up the Glenn Highway, she passed the landfill, then the correctional facility, and finally took the Artillery exit over to Eagle River Road.

Passed Eagle River Elementary. With any luck, Hazel would start second grade there in a couple days.

Or she’d be in foster care while her mother went to jail. . . .

Breathe.

Tillie wound her way off Eagle River Road, back to Meadow Creek Drive, a nice name for a nice neighborhood with families and fishing boats and pickups and swing sets in the backyard and friendly Labradors and manicured lawns and sure, probably a few broken families, but for the most part . . . safe. The kind of life that Pearl—and Tillie—had wanted for Hazel.

Pearl had even mentioned, toward the end there, getting a dog. If she hadn’t gone so quickly, Tillie might have given in.

Most of the houses sat on half acres with a line of thick evergreen between them, the forest still trying to reclaim the land.

She turned into the driveway of the smallest house in the neighborhood, but in her estimation the prettiest, painted a deep yellow with a blue door—Pearl’s idea—and a chain-link fence around the back for the someday dog, and a mostly manicured flowerbed and?—

Wait.

She put the car in park, and everything inside her seized.

Smoke drifted, black and thickening, from the backyard.

No—

She threw herself out of the car, rushed to the gate, and let herself inside, ran along the side of the house.

Stopped.

The playset, the homemade swing set that Pearl and Tillie had built for Hazel on her third birthday, threw flames into the twilight sky.

How—

She ran to the patio, where the hose lay curled in the box. She cranked on the water, then sprinted over with the hose, opening up the nozzle as she got close.

The water hit the structure, and the flames sizzled, the smoke cluttering the air, acrid and sharp. She coughed, pulled her shirt up to her nose, and kept spraying. The water filmed back over her, wetting her hair, her shirt, but the flames started to die, spurting now and again to life.

“I figured this would bring you home.”

She froze even as she doused the last of the flames. The charred legs still held the second story fort aloft.

She turned, the hose in her hands, and braced herself.

Rigger stood on the patio, the sliding door to her house open. He held a chicken leg, and she didn’t want to know how long he’d been living in her house, sleeping in her—or Pearl’s—bed, probably ripping the house apart in his search.

She raised her chin, turned off the nozzle. “What are you doing here?”

“I think you know, Steelrose.”

“That’s not my name.”

“That willalwaysbe your name.”

She rolled her eyes.

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