Hawkins didn’t say anything and she scooped Leah up in one arm and slung the tote bag over her shoulder. She was almost to the door when he said, “Rachel, they could kill you.”

She faced him. “Jacob wouldn’t hurt me.”

“Yesterday you’d’ve said he wouldn’t hurt your friend.”

When he said that she got frightened for the first time. She almost ran down the path from the house to the van. He called her, but she didn’t stop. She drove to the end of the street, pulled up, and looked back. He was standing in the open door. He was so big his head almost touched the top and his shape blocked most of the light. The houses on the block were lighted up, the street looked friendly, and she saw shadows move behind the windows. The service road and the ramp to the Expressway were dark and empty. Her hands started to sweat and she wanted to go back to Hawkins.

Everything frightened her mother and her friends, strangers and being poor most of all. They thought she was crazy to marry Adam, who was broke, and move to Minnesota away from everyone. They said anything could happen to her out there, surrounded by strangers. But she went.

Other faculty wives were scared of the Quetico-­Superior. They told her there were wolves and bears in the woods and she was crazy to go out there alone with Adam and nothing but a twenty-­two she barely knew how to use. But she went. And the first night, after Adam fell asleep, she sat next to the dying campfire and heard something rustle in the brush, something big, she thought. She wanted to wake him up and get out of there, back to town. But she made herself stay where she was, with the rifle across her knees, until the noises around her blended with the sound of the fire and the wind on the lake and in the trees, until it was a normal, natural sound that didn’t frighten her anymore. She was never scared of the woods after that.

She was scared now but she kept the car at a steady sixty, heading for Laurel. She thought of the people who get flooded out by some river and go back to live on its banks. Reporters stuck mikes in their faces and asked them why they did it. The riverbank was home, they’d answer. They lived there. Rachel heard contempt in their voices. For the reporter who asked a coward’s question. For the scared people he asked the question for. She heard defiance too—they weren’t going to let any river tell them where to live.