He only knew that the sharpest person he had ever loved was carrying a mattress down a dirt road, and that the arithmetic of it would not resolve, and that he was going to find out why if it took everything he had.

What, he kept thinking, had happened to her?

What could possibly have happened to Mabel Sterling to bring her here?

Chapter 3 — Ruined by the Vances

The next morning, Damian began asking questions in town, carefully, the way a man asks who does not yet know what he is going to find.

At the general store, the woman behind the counter — Mrs.