Shortcake

Prologoe

It had been snowing for six days.

The windows of the old house had gone white and blind. You couldn't see the road. You couldn't see the trees. You couldn't see anything at all but snow falling on snow, and the dark, and her own reflection in the glass, small and pale and very still.

The roads were closed. The phones were dead. Somewhere downstairs, forty-eight people were asleep in front of a fire.

Upstairs, a candle burned on a nightstand, the flame bending sideways in the draft from the window.

She would remember that later. The candle. How it leaned, and leaned, and never went out.

She would remember the ceiling, too. The way she tried to count the cracks in it, the way she had when she was a little girl in the hallway under the high school bleachers during tornado warnings, her mother's hand in hers and the whole town breathing in the dark around her. It always passes, Gem. It always passes. There weren't enough cracks in this ceiling. She ran out of them too fast.

And she would remember the wind. How it sounded exactly like the wind back home. How that was the worst part.

She said no out loud. In her own voice.

She said it three times.

Later, there would be people who asked her why she didn't scream. Why she didn't run. Why she'd walked up those stairs in the first place, and what she'd been wearing, and how much she'd had to drink, and whether she was sure. Later there would be lawyers and a courtroom and twelve strangers in a jury box, and a man in a good gray suit saying her name like it tasted sweet.

But that was later.

That night, there was only the snow, and the candle, and the ceiling she couldn't count.

And a girl from Florence, Oklahoma, who had never wanted to leave home in the first place.

Three months earlier