Tilly hadn’t seen her apoplectic, raving father turn toward the gun cabinet, either.

But she believed Betsy’s premonition. She believed that her father would have turned toward the gun cabinet had Betsy not stabbed him with the knife first.

Tilly loved Betsy and Johnny.

She wanted her family back. She wanted to live on a farm.

She chose love . . . and a tiny lie.

* * *

For the next two months Johnny, Tilly, and Betsy lived together in a small two-bedroom apartment near Tilly’s high school on the east side of Portland. Johnny had received the money for rent from an organization that helped out ex-convicts.

There was laughter and barrels of tears in that apartment, small but warm and clean, and certainly much better than jail. They cried for the years lost when they weren’t together, for what Johnny and Betsy had endured in jail, for what Tilly had gone through in a lonely foster care/mental health institution existence until her final kind and loving foster parents.

All of them were traumatized by their experiences, but one had to survive, and they started talking the second night about what to do to make money.

Johnny got a job at a lumber supply shop in two days. The business was fading rapidly. The widowed, childless owner was seventy-five years old and had Parkinson’s, but this was his baby, his business. Johnny told Marvin the truth. Marvin knew about the case and he took Johnny on anyhow. Johnny worked sixty hours a week. The business started to turn around.

Betsy was hired at a big-box store after she sent out a hundred applications and was rejected for all. It was the only place that would hire her. Betsy worked full-time. She eventually went from pulling in carts and custodial work, including cleaning the bathrooms, to checker, to assistant shift manager, to the manager on shift, to assistant manager, to the manager of the whole store.

Within three months, Betsy and Johnny were married. It was just the two of them in front of a minister, a friend of Marvin’s, plus Tilly and Marvin. Their honeymoon was to the beach for a weekend. They splurged by going out to dinner and eating clam chowder. Betsy did not change her last name. If their daughter was ever allowed to access the adoption paperwork in the future, if the laws changed, she wanted Rose to be able to find her.