The morning after the council dinner I walked to my parents' house in the cold, and every step felt like walking toward bad news.
I had one day off left in the whole world, and I was going to spend it making sure my way out was still there.
The pickle jars were in the wrong place. I lifted them down one by one.
The dirt behind them was swept flat and smooth, like somebody had been kind enough to tidy up after they took my life.
Two hundred and sixty dollars. My boots. My two shirts. My mother's wool socks. A year of counting pennies, gone out of the dirt.
I dug with both hands until my fingers burned, and there was nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
The paper with the date on it was not in that bag. I had moved it two nights ago, and it was folded against my ribs under my sweater.
One thing left. I still had one thing.
Then boots came down the cellar steps. Slow. One, then the other.
I know that walk the way I know my own name.
Maddox: Looking for this, love?
He turned it upside down and shook it out on my mother's floor. The jar broke and the money bled into the dirt.
Maddox: Is this what you think freedom looks like? A dirty bag and a squirrel jar?
Then he bent and picked the key out of the dirt. Small and brass, the key to this cellar.
My father gave it to me when I was nine and told me I would always have a way in.
Maddox: You will never leave me, Elowen. Not with a key, not with money, not with a fucking sheriff.
The metal clicked against his ring, and I heard it in my teeth.
Tavis: Elowen? You down there, girl?
Maddox looked up at my father's voice and smiled, and every warm thing in that cellar went cold.
He walked up into my mother's kitchen and sat down at my father's table like the chair had been waiting for him.
I stood in the doorway with dirt on my hands and no bag and nothing to say.
Maddox: Your daughter hides money from me. Little jar in the dirt, like a squirrel. You raised a squirreler, Tavis.
Tavis: You're in my house. Say what you came to say and get out of it.
Maddox: You want to hear what your daughter is? She spreads her legs for a sheriff in a mill, then tells me nothing happened.
Maddox: She's a body I use and a floor I walk on. Nobody ever wanted her but me.
My mother made a small sound, like something had come loose inside her chest.
Eamon: Get up. Get up and say that again on your own two feet.
Maddox: Or what? You'll call the law? He had her mouth in that mill, boy. Ask her.
His hand came up before anybody could move, and the back of it caught my mouth.
The old cut opened right back up. Blood ran down my chin and tasted like pennies.
Maddox: You come near her again, any one of you, and I'll put your boy in the ground.
Maddox: I'll put him at the tide line where the water takes things.
Every word of it landed in me as true. I nodded with blood on my teeth.
Niamh: Elowen. Take my hand. Right now, take my hand and come with me.
Elowen: Go. All of you, go. I'm not leaving him.
Elowen: I never was leaving him. I'm sorry I let you think I would.
Eamon: El. Please.
Tavis: You know where we live, girl. That door stays unlocked.
If they stayed, he would hurt them, and it would be my fault.
Maddox: Look at that. Back where you belong.
He slid my father's key into his pocket and took me by the chin.
Maddox: Say it.
Elowen: I'll never leave you.
And the awful part, the part I will carry to my grave, is that some small piece of me meant it.