“When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be—I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”—Wendell Berry.

“Anything else?”

As if there could be anything else.

As if her words could scald again on wounds that had already scarred and twisted and left an impossible consistency on the very idea of “anything else.” Surprises were limited in their power in the wake of her sister.

“Nothing else.”

We were still and mostly silent, waiting for my decision. She could be discarded now.

And she knew it, felt it heavily.

Once saturated in information and necessity, she had been thoroughly wrung of all knowledge. Squeezed for the bitter juice that would bring me to Ashley. But now…

Now she was useless. More than that.

A hindrance.

A liability.

But still there was the waiting. How jaded had my situation made me? Was my bark overwhelmingly more threatening than my bite? I was helplessly shrugging off the clothes of a captor. Watching them fall around my feet and hinder every possible movement like the quicksand of impossible promises.

This was it.

“What am I supposed to do now?” she asked, watching me closely from the hotel bed. Her clothing bland and simple in comparison to the gaudy zig-zag pattern of the cheap bedspread. She looked absolutely ridiculous asking such a serious question, and I would’ve said so, but why?

It took an entire night for Kyla to divulge it all. Secrets crept from her mouth for hours, her voice even and clear as she spoke them. And I listened like a dutiful parent as she unloaded months-worth of plans, red tape, and regret.

“What do you mean?” I ask, looking towards the window, though it was concealed by heavy curtains.