North Country(6)

“Yeah, we thought so too. Jon had to be convinced. He thinks it’s too far from the main buildings.”

“He should be happy with whatever he’s given,” I mutter. My family has spent over a hundred years clearing and farming this land. No doubt he’s got his sights set on it.

“Jon is like a son to me,” my dad counters sharply before pursing his lips.

Maybe he thinks he’s wounded me with his words, but I feel nothing. I already know where my father stands as far as I’m concerned. He made that obvious long ago. “How’d Mom convince you to come get me, anyway?” The question I’ve waited hours to ask .

With a heavy sigh, he admits, “If I hadn’t gone, she would have, and she’s juggling too many things with that market of hers.” He nods at the window above. “They cleaned up the apartment for you. Got a new fridge and stove, even set up a computer. We thought you’d be more comfortable up there.”

“I’d be more comfortable, or everyone else would be?” I ask before I can help myself. What does my family truly think about the infamous Landry son returning? How does dear Jon feel about his convict brother-in-law around his brood of kids?

I’m not stupid. I know my mother is the only reason I’m here now.

“This is gonna be an adjustment for everyone, Logan. Don’t make it harder than it needs to be.”

My gaze veers beyond the garage and my new, segregated home, to the yellow house across the field. It sits just past the property line, as if our two families made a pact long ago to live within shouting distance, out here in the middle of nowhere. A navy-blue Ford Expedition is parked out front. A light glows in the kitchen, revealing movement within the window.

“McAllisters still live next door,” my dad offers. “Emery is divorced and moved back here with her daughter, Isla. Clive died, oh, seven years ago now. Sandy, about three.”

A cheating husband, a heart attack, and a brain aneurysm, in that order. I already know all this. I knew about it when it happened, on account of Mom’s letters, each one written with painstakingly detailed descriptions of the minutest chatter from around Cold River, including what was happening with the girl next door.

Even in those early years when I wasn’t returning Mom’s letters, I was reading them. Memorizing them. I remember when Emery dropped out of university. She told her parents it wasn’t for her. She left for the police college not long after. That was always her end goal, anyway—she might as well have come out of the womb holding a badge. She finished at the top of her class and could have gone anywhere, but she decided to come back here and take a job at an OPP detachment forty minutes away, where her dad wasn’t in command.

I was floored when I heard Emery started seeing Dillon Sanders again. They dated back in high school, and he screwed around on her. I broke his nose for it. Worse, she married the idiot the second time around, in a shotgun wedding after she got pregnant.

I acutely remember the letter detailing the night Emery caught Dillon at a motel with another woman. I was torn between self-righteousness and sympathy. She moved back in with her parents, a six-year-old in tow. The affair was kept under wraps for her daughter’s sake. The official story was that they’d gotten married too young. I don’t know that anyone around town believed it, but it didn’t stop them from electing him mayor—the youngest in Cold River’s history.

Dillon married that woman once his divorce from Emery was final, and the co-parenting situation remained hostile for years. They seem to have gotten over that hump, though, according to my mother, to find a relatively civil balance. Emery hasn’t dated anyone since, choosing to immerse herself in work and her daughter.

Yes, I know every story beat of Emery McAllister’s life.

“She took over for her old man, huh?” The girl I grew up with was scrappy, her pale, red-tinged hair usually pulled back in a braid that frizzed in the summertime. She swung baseball bats and hung upside down from tree branches. She was smart, dependable, a rule follower.

She was my best friend.

And then she was more. I never saw it coming. I didn’t look at her that way, not until she returned from a summer away as a camp counselor looking less like the girl I’d thrown snowballs at and more like the ones I’d been chasing. Gone were the lanky limbs, the round cheeks, the childish pigtail braids. Now she had female curves and a natural beauty that I saw every time I closed my eyes at night. And she started dating fucking Dillon Sanders.

That’s when I smartened up and, lo and behold, she admitted her crush on me too. That last year of high school with her holds my best memories.

Until, on my eighteenth birthday, I made the worst mistake of my life.

“A bit young to be given that kind of responsibility if you ask me, but she’s managed all right, I suppose,” Dad cuts into my daydream. “For a female.”

“Toughest guard I ever had was female,” I counter. CO Ansell—a tiny woman who took her job more seriously than any male there. Her words were her first line of defense, and her tongue was sharper than the shiv an inmate drove through my ribs. She liked me because I never tried anything with her—no “sweetheart” or “darling”; I was never up her ass with compliments.

My dad grunts. “An interesting dynamic, having that ex of hers running the town and her running the law. But it’s never a bad thing for our family to be tight with the local police, especially now.”