"How long has he been like this?"
"He's okay."
"Josie."
"Since last fall. It's worse since spring." She gripped the handlebars of her bicycle. "I do the pills. I do the bills. His check comes to the bank and I write the checks and he signs them, mostly, and if he can't, I can do his signature, I've been practicing it since I was nine. I do the groceries. I put hooks on the doors so he doesn't go out at night. I took the rotor out of his truck." She pulled it out of her pocket and showed him, a little gray plastic thing on her palm. "We're fine. We're fine. Please don't tell anybody. If they find out, they'll take him somewhere and they'll take me somewhere else and it won't be the same somewhere, it'll be Reno or Las Vegas or someplace with strangers, and he won't know where I am, and he'll be scared all the time." She heard her own voice going high and thin and she stopped and made it go flat again. "Please."
Boone looked at the rotor in her hand for a long time.
"I'm not gonna promise you that," he said.
Her eyes stung.
"I'm not gonna promise it, because I don't know if I can keep it, and I'm done making promises I can't keep. Here's what I will promise." He crouched down, which took him a while and made both knees crack, until his face was level with hers. "I won't do one thing about this, not one, without telling you first. To your face. You'll never hear about it from somebody else. Deal?"
It wasn't the deal she wanted. She knew it was the only true one she was going to get.
"Deal," she said.
He held out his bad hand. She shook it, carefully, so as not to hurt the knuckles.
* * *
Nobody announced anything. That was how Josie knew they were grown-ups who had done this kind of thing before.