It was Jazzy who said, on a Tuesday morning between exits, that they needed to make a stop.
Not on the itinerary. Definitely not on the itinerary. Lillian pointed this out from the back seat with the calm precision of a woman who had strong feelings about itineraries.
"Thirty years I've been carrying this," Jazzy said, and the way she said it made everyone stop talking. It was not the voice she used for the radio or the rest stops or the running commentary on every passing billboard. It was a different voice entirely — stripped of the performance, just the woman underneath. "I'm dying. I've been saying I'll do it and I keep not doing it. We're forty minutes from the town. I need to go."
Nobody argued after that.
Holder drove them off the highway and through the kind of small town that looks exactly like it did thirty years ago, which can be either a comfort or an indictment depending on why you're there. Jazzy directed him to a neighborhood of modest houses and a yard with a garden that had clearly been tended with care, and she said stop here and he stopped.
She sat in the van for two minutes without moving.
"Do you want one of us to come?" Jonnis asked.
"No," Jazzy said. "She doesn't know you. She needs to see just me."
She got out of the van. She walked up the path with the posture of a woman who had spent her whole life entering rooms and had never once entered a harder one than this.
Holder watched from the driver's seat. He did not mean to keep watching. He could not look away.
The door opened. A woman, mid-fifties, cautious face. Recognition moving across it — slow, then fast, then something complicated that Holder couldn't read from forty feet away. The two women stood on the porch for a long time. Then the door opened wider and Jazzy went inside.
She was in there forty-five minutes.
The van was very quiet. Jonnis had stopped humming. Lillian's Bible was closed on her lap.
When Jazzy came out her eyes were red but her back was straight. She walked back to the van and got in and put on her seatbelt and didn't say anything for a moment.
"She forgave me," she said finally. Like she was still figuring out what that meant. "I didn't think she would. I've been so sure she wouldn't that I convinced myself I didn't deserve to try."
Jonnis reached over and covered her hand.
"You deserve to try," Jonnis said. "Everybody does."
Jazzy nodded. She looked out the window at the house with its careful garden. Then she said:
"Okay. Let's go."
Holder drove them back to the highway. He thought about the thing he had watched from the van — the walking up the path, the posture, the forty-five minutes, the walking back. He thought about the people he had wronged. He thought about how easy it was to convince yourself you didn't deserve to try.
He filed it. The way you file things you know you're going to need later.