“Would you describe your marriage as happy?”

“Happy? I don’t see how that’s any of your business, Officer.”

Nate strained to hear. The words “take his own life” sounded almost like some procedure in a science textbook, explaining the dissection of a planaria or the insertion of a pipette in a Bunsen burner. The words didn’t match the meaning.

From where he was leaning against the wall, Nate could see the photograph of his parents on their wedding day— his mom in the same dress she still put on for parent-teacher conferences, his dad in a suit, with the pants too short and his wrists showing—in front of the old Dodge. His dad’s arm was around his mom, and he was grinning like the Cubs had just won the World Series. They’d gotten married at the town hall in Roundup and come home right after. Dad was working on Poppa’s ranch back then, and chores didn’t go away just because someone got married.

“Who needs a honeymoon?” his father had told Nate and Junie one time when she asked where they’d gone after the wedding. “Every day with your mother is a honeymoon.”

But then Nate remembered a time, a couple of years back, when his dad had called to him and Junie to come out to the barn. He had a surprise for them, he said. He called it their zipline—a pulley, rigged to the rafters at the highest point in the hayloft. The idea was to climb up on a ladder, grab tight to the handles he’d made, and let yourself sail down the rope, from one end of the barn clear to the other, landing on a big pile of hay.

Even though he was the big brother, Nate was uneasy about trying the zipline. It was Junie who couldn’t wait to ride it. “She’s pretty little, Dad,” Nate had said dubiously. “Are you sure it’s okay?”

“She’s a trouper,” their father replied. “Aren’t you, Juniper girl?”

Nate had stood on the straw-covered floor, watching her. She couldn’t have been more than four at the time, in her old overalls and her precious pink cowboy boots. “Watch me go, Natie,” she called out as she grabbed on to the handles.

Maybe because she weighed so little, she’d taken off so fast, like some circus performer on The Ed Sullivan Show. But her cries were happy ones as she whipped across the barn, high above the cows in their stalls and the cream separator and the buckets.

As she was coming down for a landing, they saw—in the split second before she touched ground—that there was nothing in place to slow her down.