Chapter 3 - What Her Silence MeantShe didn't answer right away. She set the little girl down, told her to go pick some of the wildflowers growing along the ditch, waited until the girl had wandered a few feet away, small and absorbed in her task, before she turned back to Weston.

"Her name is Ivy," Elena said. "She's my granddaughter."

The word landed strangely. Weston did the math without meaning to — twenty-six years since Elena left, which meant if she'd had a child shortly after leaving, that child would now be in their mid-twenties. Old enough to have a three-year-old of their own.

"Granddaughter," he repeated.

"My son's daughter." Elena's voice had gone very careful, very controlled, the voice of someone choosing every word like it cost her something to spend it. "Marco. He was born the June after I left."

Weston felt the ground tilt beneath him for the second time in five minutes.

"The June after you left."

"Yes."

"Elena." He made himself say it slowly, made himself hold her gaze even though every instinct told him to look away from what he suspected was coming. "Is Marco my son?"

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For a long moment, she said nothing at all. Down the ditch, Ivy had gathered a fistful of black-eyed Susans and was carefully arranging them by size on a flat rock, entirely unbothered by the conversation happening behind her, twenty-six years of consequence settling quietly over the two adults who had once loved each other on a summer night neither of them had expected to matter this much.

"Yes," Elena finally said. "Marco is your son. He was your son. He died four months ago. Car accident, on the interstate outside Millbrook. Ivy's mother left when she was one, and I've been raising her alone since Marco died, and I lost the apartment because I couldn't keep up the rent on his life insurance running out and my hours getting cut at the plant, and that," she said, gesturing at the wagon, the mattress, the two miles of empty road still ahead of them, "is the entire story, Weston. That's everything. Now you know."