He certainly wouldn’t have. He would have been too suspicious. He didn’t know why she wasn’t, a woman living alone...

He walked back to the front of the cottage, and she came rushing out. “There you are,” she said. “What dumbass thing are you doing, wandering around outside? Get inside.”

He walked in slowly, and she closed the door behind him. “Maybe I wasn’t clear. I don’t want anyone to know that you’re here. And there are people around here. Everywhere. The Sullivan sisters just live a few hundred yards down the road. And a lot of different ranch hands live in various dwellings on the property. It’s fifty thousand acres.”

“No shit,” he said. “Fifty thousand?”

“It’s eight square miles. It’s a town in and of itself, like I said.”

“Would anybody have any clue that I was staying with you, or would they just think that I was one of the ranch hands?”

“Well, that is a fair point,” she said. “Maybe they wouldn’t know. But your brother would. If he saw you.”

“I told you. I don’t have a lot of confidence in Jake’s smarts. He thinks he’s cleverer than he is. He also thinks he’s scarier than he is. I’m sure he thinks I ran as far and fast as I could. It wouldn’t occur to him that I’d stop and double back.”

“Where is your brother...based out of?”

“Copper Ridge.”

“That’s not very far away.”

“No. It isn’t. But that’s one reason he does it. He doesn’t actually commit crime in the town, but that’s his home base. And that’s how he manages to keep himself pretty clean. How my dad managed to do it before him. Keep your head low, run the nasty shit up to Portland. And there’s a big port up there. Easy to export all the bad stuff. That’s how he does it.”

“Wow. For all that work, you’d think you could just get a job.”

“You would think. That was what I did.”

“What makes people do that, do you think?” she asked. He noticed that there were bags of groceries sitting on the table. Little fabric bags. Of course she had her reusable bags. She seemed like that type. Like she thought about everything.

“What is what?”

“Why do some people do everything that they were raised to do. Then other people don’t. It seems to me, even though we are on extreme ends of the spectrum, that we both decided to be different than our families. I just wonder why. I wonder what pushes a person to make that decision.”

“For me it was when I saw my brother shoot someone. Thank God he lived, but... Some guy that worked for them. Shot him. Like he wasn’t anything. I knew that was wrong. My dad never did anything like that. Not in front of anybody, anyway. There was enough plausible deniability that I can try to find ways to believe what he said when I was young. But you can’t explain away that. I couldn’t excuse that. Didn’t matter that the guy was a scumbag just like my brother. It doesn’t excuse the violence. I couldn’t stomach it.