Virginia met her gaze in Tourmaline’s bathroom mirror and took a deep breath. What now, Virginia Campbell? She’d come this far on her own. She’d held on this long. Now she would make something of the situation. Her way.

Reaching under her shirt, she pulled off her bra and stuffed it into her pocket. It was cheap, and not until she’d had it tucked away did she realize all roads might lead her to the same place. That maybe this was all she truly had to use. Fluffing her hair and fixing the long dark strands carefully around her face, she avoided looking at herself in the mirror.

Now wasn’t the time to hold back. If there was one thing she should be good at by this point, it was working a room full of grown-ass men. Slipping into the hall, she lingered in the shadows and studied the pictures hanging in the hallway.

Here on this family wall, Tourmaline was depicted sitting in a lawn chair in the summer, holding an American flag. She was probably ten. Smiling that sweet margarine smile in a white T-shirt, with her hair in two braids. A younger, more crumpled Jason sat in a chair beside her, half out of the photo, a dazed look on his face despite the tight smile for the camera.

And though he did take a girl’s breath away, she preferred him now. With the weight of existence age had given him. With more sun and more beard. His presence in the photo was noteworthy—either he’d earned a weird spot in the family, or they didn’t know how to crop him out. It had been Jason speaking just then, back in the kitchen. Jason who’d asked Tourmaline whether she was all right. Jason who kept glancing past Virginia.

To Tourmaline?

Virginia tightened her mouth and moved on.

A woman who looked like Tourmaline laughed over her shoulder. Her blond hair was pulled to one side. The leather jacket across her shoulders was embroidered with crimson roses and green leaves, and strung with black fringe and silver medallions. On her lower back, the words Property of Harris embroidered in white among the leaves. She was the kind of woman who made even Virginia want to linger and stare, and not on account of what she looked like, but because of the look of wild spaces and freedom in her whole being.

This was the woman who was once married to the Wardens’ president, had his baby, and now resided as a number in USP Hazelton, doing time—at least, according to Tourmaline—for a boyfriend’s transgressions.

The woman in the picture was what Virginia always thought she’d become. What she’d grow into. And suddenly, it seemed as if she might not become that woman at all, but skip immediately to the woman residing in federal prison, doing time for a darkness she couldn’t escape. Or she might become the woman her mother had always been. The one always too wrapped up in grief to realize she was wasting it on a terrible man.

A tired longing flared deep in Virginia’s bones.

She didn’t want to do this. Any of it. She wanted to get off this road that seemed to have no end. She wanted to know that in less than three months, she, too, would be leaving this all behind for a better, safer place. And it choked her to stand here, in Tourmaline’s house, and see just how far from that she truly was.

It was quiet. A lull. Time to make an entrance.

Virginia shook her body awake, hardening each limb, look, and thought as she stepped out of the hall. In order to survive, she couldn’t get caught here, longing for someone else’s life.

She scanned quickly, taking in Tourmaline’s dad at the head of the table, Tourmaline at the end, and Jason leaning on his elbow between them. The black guy who’d been with Jason at the bar stood in the kitchen, cooking. The tiredness she’d felt in the hall was pushed deep beneath the exhilaration of doing what she did well.

They all turned to look at her.

They were only three men, in jeans and T-shirts, the air conditioner in the window and the ceiling fan overhead fluttering their sleeves. But despite the clear age differences, together they all seemed alike—brothers bred in the mating of gnarled oaks and springs gurgling under ancient boulders. It seemed as if none of them had been born, but had walked out of the darkness, full grown, on the back of a harsh mountain wind. They were myths, for certain. Centuries dressed in days. They were tall tales that already outrageous men told of things wilder and crazier than they.

They were dangerous, she could sense that. The awareness brushed her skin with cold and tingled the hairs on the back of her neck. At the same time, the nature of the danger evaded her—it was wrapped inside average, warm bodies, contained in the smell of old carpet and dry seventies wood paneling mixed with rich food and burnt tobacco. Earthy and warm and close all around, filling a deep hollow in her belly. Comforting in its baseness.

And really, they weren’t very different from regular men, these Wardens.

Jason stiffened without moving—a satisfying reaction after he had twice looked right past her. The guy cooking looked up. Tourmaline’s father yanked his legs off the table and sat up, tension around his eyes as he avoided looking in her direction.

None of this was new.

Tourmaline sat at the head of the table like a dogwood in the bare branches of wild April. She was relaxed, her hair held back by a headband but loose and wild to her waist. Her blouse half tucked into cutoffs. She sat impervious to the men coming down from the woods. Gone was the quiet, forgettable girl Virginia barely remembered from school. This girl made sense. This girl was in context. This girl was someone Virginia could almost like.