Page 18 of The Invisible Hour

“My mother is the one who told me you weren’t my father.” Mia knew that going with him was nothing her mother would have wanted. “You never were. She left me a letter. You were her biggest regret.”

Joel gazed directly into her face. “I have legal rights,” he said. “Your mother and I were married.”

“That doesn’t mean you’re anything to me. I could sue you for false imprisonment,” Mia told him. “I could go to the police right now.”

West of the moon, the only girls who were rescued were the ones who saved themselves.

Joel looked at her, dumbstruck. “Is this the way you speak to me? I created you,” he said in a tight voice. “What I have created belongs to me, whether or not I’m your father.”

“Call the police,” Mia shouted over her shoulder to Constance. “I’m being kidnapped.” From the look on Joel’s face, Mia could tell that he knew she was serious.

“I’m getting out my phone,” Constance shouted back. “I’m calling them now.”

“You always were a little nothing,” Joel told Mia. He was grinning even though his tone was laced with spite. “I should have gotten rid of you on the day you were born. I thought about it, and Ivy would have done it. She would have left you on the steps of town hall if I’d told her to.”

“That’s not true.” Mia was trying her best not to care, but he was hurting her all the same, and he knew it.

“I knew her far better than you did. I knew her parents didn’t want her, no one did, except for me.”

“Call the police now,” Mia shouted to Constance. “Tell them I’m in danger.”

“You think you’ve won,” Joel said, and she did, because for all his bluster, he had let her go and was walking back toward his truck. Constance came to stand beside Mia.

“That piece of shit,” Constance said.

Mia couldn’t help it. She’d been terrified, and now she laughed out loud, nearly doubling over.

“What?” Constance said, confused.

“I’ve never heard you say that word,” Mia told her. “You don’t curse.”

“When I see a piece of shit, I call it like it is,” Constance remarked. “Always have. Always will.”

They stood there for a while, in the cold blue air. The truck had vanished, as if it had never been there, but there was black exhaust in the air.

“You do not belong to him,” Constance said firmly. “You belong to yourself.”

SARAH MOTT RESIGNED FROM her position at the library in Blackwell and moved in with Constance on the day before Christmas. There had been an opening at the library in the Concord School, and Sarah was delighted that at last she and Constance would live together; they all were. It was a snowy day when Sarah arrived, and after they unpacked the car, they took a walk around Walden Pond, then had a festive supper with homemade cranberry sauce and macaroni and cheese rather than the traditional turkey dinner.

“Will you miss Blackwell?” Mia asked Sarah when Constance went into the kitchen to prepare their dessert, pecan pie with maple walnut ice cream. She had planned to end the dinner with an apple pie, but Mia confided that she despised apples and wouldn’t ever eat them again, not even if they were baked in a pie.

“Not if I’m here with Constance,” Sarah responded. “What about you? Do you miss it?”

Mia shook her head. “Not at all.” But the truth was, Blackwell surfaced in Mia’s dreams. At night she found herself dreaming about the rising waters of the Last Look River, and the clouds above Hightop Mountain, and the yellow fields of grass. Sometimes Joel was in her dreams, watching her and not saying a word, as if he were a ghost from the underworld. Sometimes she had her own daughter, one whom she made certain to bring west of the moon so that no one and nothing could ever hurt her.

“I’ve heard people are leaving the Community,” Sarah said. “People say he’s mistreating the children and should be in jail. They say he couldn’t even keep his own daughter in line.”

“That isn’t me,” Mia said.

“It most certainly isn’t,” Sarah assured her. “He’s a liar.”

“Who’s a liar?” Constance asked cheerfully when she returned with dessert. Snippets of conversation had floated into the kitchen, and she loved the echo of Sarah’s voice in her house.

“That man,” Sarah said. None of them ever said his name aloud. “Maybe he’ll disappear into thin air.”

“He’s gone as far as I’m concerned,” Constance said as she set down gold-rimmed plates of pie topped with several spoonfuls of vanilla whipped cream.

LATER, AFTER MIA HAD said good night, she slipped out into the yard. In the dark, she could hear the river as the wind gusted and tree branches shifted above her. The night was filled with glittering stars. Mia felt the damage that the Community had done to her; all the same, she missed certain things. Reading in the barn, her favorite ewe, Dottie, the ferns in the woods, her mother’s laughter across the garden as they weeded, Hightop Mountain, the crunch of twigs under her boots as she made her way back from the library, sitting by the river immersed in the book she loved most.