Your name, your business, your mother — I am dragging all of it down with me, and you will hate me for it eventually, and I would rather leave now than watch that happen.”

“Then I’m staying on the bus,” I said.

“I’ll go to the next county.

I’ll go across the state.

Wherever this bus is going, that is where I am going, because I am not letting you decide, all by yourself, in the dark, that I have to lose you in order to protect myself.

That is not your decision to make alone.

Not anymore.” And I laid out, one at a time, every objection before she could raise it — the sawmill I could sell less lumber from, the town that could talk until it ran out of breath, my mother who had already begun to understand that she had nearly made the same terrible mistake as everyone else.