They sat for a while. The wind came off the water and moved the hair at their temples. Somewhere across the reservoir a dog barked twice and stopped.
Then Shelby reached out and picked up the tinfoil square.
Kristen didn't move. She wanted to grab it. Every muscle in her arms wanted to snatch it out of her sister's hand and throw it as far as she could. She kept her hands in her lap. She thought of Brock in the locker room, his hand out, his voice flat. Give it to me. She thought of how it had felt to be the one being stood over. She did not want to be the one doing the standing. Not tonight. Not ever again, if she could help it.
Shelby stood up. She walked to the chain-link fence at the edge of the overlook, where the ground fell away to the rocks and the churn below the spillway. She held the foil square up between two fingers, and for a terrible moment Kristen thought she was going to unfold it.
Then she pushed it through one of the diamonds of the fence and let it go.
It was too small to see fall. It was just gone, into the noise and the dark.
Shelby stood there with her fingers hooked in the fence and her forehead against the wire. Kristen got up and went and stood beside her, not touching, close enough that their elbows almost met.
"That's twenty-three days," Shelby said into the fence. "Still. Right? That's still twenty-three?"
"It's still twenty-three."
"I left, though. I signed the thing."
"So we call them," Kristen said. "And we ask."
She called Cedar Hollow from the second phone, from the contact labeled CH Intake. The night nurse who answered had a smoker's voice and a slow, unhurried way of talking that Kristen thought must be trained into them. She asked to speak to Shelby. She asked Shelby questions Kristen couldn't hear. Then she came back on and said that if Shelby presented at the front desk by eight a.m., sober, they would readmit her for the remaining seven days, and that this was not something they always did, and that she should not make a habit of it.
"I'll bring her," Kristen said. "I'll be the one to bring her."
"There's a balance on the account for the last week," the nurse said. "Billing will want to talk to the responsible party."