I watch the town flow by like a strip of drab ribbon as we turn onto a side street: brick post office; a Chinese restaurant called Song’s Banquet, with sagging green awnings and a gold dragon over the door; a gas station with old-school pumps that scroll gallons and cents past you like a one-armed bandit. Lots of empty shop windows, apartment buildings papered with For Rent signs. When a mill goes under, it takes everything: jobs, money for schools, community stuff. What you’re left with is this, a slow evacuation, people moving on, looking for anything better.

Trace pulls into the side lot of a run-down little convenience store on the far end of Main Street called D&M, parking beside a mud-splattered Blazer and saying under his breath, “Yesss. Owen. I heart you, bro.”

You can see the mill from here, a gigantic battleship-gray complex sprawling along the Penobscot, only a few telltale signs to hint that it’s closed: no smoke from the stacks, parking lot a quarter full. Dad’s in there somewhere, piling steel and rebar to be carried upriver by barge to a scrapyard. Not breathing asbestos. They wouldn’t let that happen. Somebody must check.

Trace gets into the Blazer’s backseat, emerging with a heavy paper bag. Catches us watching and does a Grinch tiptoe that gets even Bree laughing.

He stashes the bag in the trunk before thumping back into the driver’s seat, texting somebody as he says, “We get pulled over, they can’t search the vehicle without cause. So don’t flash your piece at ’em, Bree-Bree.”

She looks out the window. “As long as you hide the crack you’re obviously on.”

We pull back onto Main Street and hang a right. Sage glances at him. “Uh, babe? Where are we going?”

Trace starts whistling: loud, exactly on pitch, like somebody’s grandpa. The tune might even be “Moon River.”

“Perfect Street. Am I right?” When he slides Sage a sidelong look, she sighs, folding her arms. “There’s no point.”

“What? I want to take a nice drive through a nice neighborhood. Don’t you think that sounds nice?” But he’s distracted, focusing on our destination, what turns out to be a simple left onto an average street.

The sign actually reads Prefect Street—but it is perfect, a slice of small-town Americana, oozing white clapboards and lemonade porches and two-car garages. Everybody has real curtains—no bedsheets or towels tacked up to block the light like you sometimes see in the Terraces. We’re all hushed as Trace rolls along at five miles per. No reason to hurry; the street’s dead. A few mom-mobiles in driveways, most everybody else at their nine-to-fiver, I guess, their kids at football or soccer practice.

Sage presses the tip of her nose to the window. “I bet everybody here has a washer and dryer. No hauling laundry bags around.” Pause. “Bastards.”