"Are you going to be mad the whole time?"
"Probably."
Shelby laughed, wet and surprised. "Okay. That's fair. That's okay."
She got out. She walked up the path past the one-handed saint in her too-big sneakers, and at the door she turned and lifted her hand, and Kristen lifted hers, and then her sister went inside, by her own choice, and the door closed behind her.
Kristen sat in the lot for twenty minutes. Then she went in and found the billing office and sat across from the nice woman with the reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she wrote a check from her own personal account, the small one she'd had since she was nineteen, the one that had paid for Shelby's braces and her eighth-grade class trip and her first semester at the community college before she'd dropped out. It cleaned the account out. She signed her name in full.
The first thing Mr. Ferris Quaid said to them, in an office above a hearing-aid store with a window that looked out on a parking garage, was that he did not do fixing.
"I do noticing," he said. He was a slight man in his late sixties with a white beard trimmed close and a cardigan with leather elbow patches, which Kristen thought was a bit much until she saw that the patches had been sewn on by hand, unevenly, by someone who loved him. "If you're here to have me tell one of you that you're right, I'm going to disappoint you. You're both right about something. That's usually how it goes."
They saw him every Thursday at six. Brock drove in from his brother Danny's place on the far side of the city and parked three spaces away from her, never next to her, a courtesy he'd come up with on his own. In the third session, Ferris Quaid asked Kristen what she had felt in the locker room, and she said scared, and he asked her to say more, and she said that for one second she had looked up at her husband and seen a stranger who was bigger than her, and that she had spent eleven years not knowing that was possible. Brock sat with his hands between his knees and did not look away from her while she said it. Ferris Quaid let the silence stand for a long time and then said, quietly, "That's a real thing that happened. It doesn't get to be less real because nothing else happened after it."
In the fifth session, Ferris Quaid asked Brock what the second phone had given him, and Brock said, after a long time, "Somewhere to be important." And Kristen, who had been ready to be angry, found that she was not, or not only.
The money did not come back quickly. Brock picked up a six a.m. boot camp in a church parking lot and two more private clients, and he sold the rowing machine and the set of competition kettlebells he had kept in their garage since before they were married, and every other Friday he transferred what he could into the porch fund and sent her a screenshot of the transfer without any message attached. She didn't answer them. She saved them in a folder.
She opened a second account of her own, in her name only, and put a little in it every month. She told him she'd done it. It was not, she explained to Ferris Quaid, a punishment. It was just true that she needed a door that was hers.
Shelby finished her thirty days on the twenty-first, as Tanner had said she would. Kristen and Jolene drove up together to bring her home, and Jolene talked the whole way about her orchids and about a crossword clue she had been stuck on for nine days, and then, somewhere past the grain elevators, went quiet and said that she had written a letter to her daughter in Eugene. She hadn't sent it. She just wanted somebody to know it existed.
"What does it say?" Kristen asked.