“They’re in and out of service for satellite coverage. They don’t always have phones in the villages when the team arrives. He calls when he’s not out in the field. He knows I’ll tell you guys all about what’s going on.”

Her mother’s mouth flattened a moment. “Neither one of you calls enough. Except he’s changing the world and you’re making coffee. You’re wasting your potential and working yourself to the bone trying to do everything when you could just let us help you.” Her mother buttered her bread with choppy little swipes. The tension began to build in the room. Slowly stealing the oxygen until the fight-or-flight reflex threatened to kick in.

“I don’t want to have this argument again.” And she didn’t. She wouldn’t argue and wouldn’t defend her position anymore because they’d said it all, and it was time to move on. She didn’t want to be angry over it anymore.

Her father put his glass down and began to eat. “You had a job interview sometime this week, didn’t you?”

He remembered, and that made her smile again.

“It went really well. I know them all since I’ve worked there for the last nine months. I’m already in training for the job, which really gives me a leg up. I’m good with the clients, and I really want this. That has to mean something. I’m not just doing this job until something better comes along. I want it.”

She studied her father. He’d lost weight since his last back surgery, but his color was better than it had been just a few months before. He’d never be the vibrant man he was before the accident, but he walked with a cane and didn’t have to sit every few feet. He was making an effort, and she wondered how many times each of them might have extended a little bit more and the others missed it or were too angry or hurt to respond. Suddenly it all seemed very silly to not just try a little harder.

“You look good, Pop. I forgot to tell you that when I came in.” She squeezed his hand.

Startled for a moment, he smiled back at her. “Thank you, sweetheart.”

“When will you know about the job?”

She looked back toward her mother. The tension lifted a little bit. “A few weeks or so. They have an executive committee who’ll meet to discuss final recommendations, and they have special steps to perform to comply with the grants that partially fund the position. I’m training one of the part-timers at the café to take over for me and hired another two people for staff since Erin won’t be back for a while, and I’ll be gone.”

“Good. Good. Well, so tell us then, what your brother and uncle are up to.” Her mother put another slice of roast beef on Ella’s plate, daring her to argue.

She didn’t.

Instead she filled them in on Mick and her Uncle Michael’s recent trips into the Bolivian interior to deliver medical supplies and run clinics in the villages, leaving out the part about the team getting shot at. They worried about him enough as it was.

And for the first time in a long time, when she left, she didn’t want to cry.

It had felt as if she’d finally reached the end of a long, hard road and could afford the luxury of pausing enough to look around. She liked a lot of what she saw in her life. She’d spent the last years putting her life back together. Slowly getting herself through one challenge at a time. Each one of those moments had been powerful in its own way. There were struggles to be faced and overcome. She knew she hadn’t seen the last of them in her life. But she did look forward to more normal struggles like dating.

As Elise had told her just a few weeks before, she wasn’t alone. She had her friends, and that took the edge off a lot of crappy days. She was still smiling as she parked her car in the very well lit space near her apartment building’s front door. The stars were out, but the moon hid, glowing through the high clouds shrouding it.

Summer had faded, and early fall was beginning to settle in. It got dark earlier and light later. The brilliant blue of the sky would fade as the rains made the bright red and yellow leaves stick to every surface like confetti. The rain would settle in soon, and like most Seattleites, she didn’t mind it. She worked around it and found ways to enjoy the weather because it was simply the price one paid to live in a place so verdant and lush.

One small, dark corner of her heart hated it when it was dark so much. It brought the edges of her fear closer. It was the darkness and the way it could hide things. People. She paused at that last thought, remembering.

She’d been walking back from her car. Had deliberately disobeyed Bill by staying out late with her cousins who’d been visiting from Maine. It had been dark and cold, though her cousin Sharon had mocked Ella. After all, Mainers were made of stern stuff and scoffed at thirty-eight degrees!

She’d been smiling as she hurried toward their apartment. Earlier, before she’d left, she’d made him his favorite dinner. Pork chops, mashed potatoes and green beans. Sometimes such little things could keep him happy, and he’d let her infractions slide.

It was then he jumped out from the hedges at the front door, screaming, grabbing her and dragging her toward the alley. Her heart had raced, more so after she realized it was him and not a stranger. He’d clamped a hand over her mouth then and told her, as she’d trembled and held back her sobs, that if he’d wanted her dead, he could make it happen.

“See what could happen if you stay out after dark? No one would miss you but me. I’m all you have, Ella. Don’t you forget it. When I tell you to be home by eight, I’m being generous because it’s your family. And then you go and ruin it by making me worry.”