From the driver’s side stepped a woman with sharp green eyes I knew — eyes I had last seen in a face half this size — and a small pale scar on her chin, the exact scar she’d gotten falling off a porch swing when she was three and I was seven and I’d carried her inside screaming.

Beside her stood a tall young man built like our father, a resemblance that hit me in the sternum.

And behind them came a younger woman holding a photograph in both hands.

I knew the photograph.

I had its twin in my wallet, soft and furred at the edges from twenty years of handling: the four of us on a red picnic blanket, squinting into the sun, two weeks before Highway 9.

Chapter 15 — Ruby, Silas, Hazel