We arrived at his land after a series of turns I couldn’t have repeated on my own, yet this disorientation didn’t scare me. For some reason, I trusted Jackson.

“This is the Nine,” he said, pulling into a gravel drive marked by nothing except an old black mailbox.

“Why the Nine?”

“Ninety acres.”

I decided not ask how large or small ninety acres was, settling instead on a notion of a happy medium, a modest fortune of land.

“My dad left it to me when he died,” Jackson said. “My brother and I didn’t even know he had it. He gave Charlie the house in Lawrence, and I got this. I felt cheated, at first.”

“But not anymore?”

“Not a bit.”

“Because the house in Lawrence is crappy?”

“No,” he said, a hint of defensiveness in his tone. “Because the land is the land, and it’s completely mine—was always supposed to be mine. Because if the land were Charlie’s he would have ruined it. Would have done something stupid like sell it or develop it or whatever. This place would be a shoe store or a nail salon or something stupid like that.”

I curled my fingers into my palms, hiding the French tips I’d just had done.

“And I’m good here. I built myself this little place.” He gestured toward what could have easily passed for a garden shed in the city. The structure stood half-hidden by trees, flanked by piles of wood, scrap metal, and cinder blocks. The house itself boasted two little windows. Through the glass I could make out rows of mason jars filled with yellow flowers.

“Like it?” he asked.

I did like it, in the way that people like pictures of places where they would never actually like to live, like tree houses or tents set up on snowy alpine ledges. “It’s very rustic,” I said. This seemed to satisfy him.

Jackson parked his truck on a little clearing across the way from the house. He looked at me, his eyes bright with something I rarely saw in people anymore. He radiated a naive joy I’d known well during college but that had drained so fast after graduation it now seemed impossible I had ever possessed it. “This here is some of the only wilderness left in Kansas,” he said.

“I didn’t know Kansas had any wilderness.”

“Wilderness is just something nobody’s never touched. You don’t need mountains or waterfalls to be wild.”

“Okay. So. What do you do with a girl out here in the wilderness?” I expected a certain type of answer, the answer all men gave when posed this brand of question. He would offer a wry smile, maybe plop a meaty hand on my thigh and say something like, We could go inside and I could show you around, or, I have a few ideas in mind.

But Jackson just hopped out and ran a little sprint to the truck bed, from which he extracted two rather large guns. “How about some hunting?” he called.