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“You get her,” I said, and took another step back.

“Huger, we have to—”

“You get her!” I shouted. “You get her!” and I took another step away.

Unc stood there a moment, that hand out to me, the air between us filled with the muffled cries of my mother, and then that hand dropped, and he turned, made his way toward the log, felt along the trunk a few feet, then squatted, reached in.

“Come on, Eugenie,” he whispered. “It’ll be all right, girl. Come on.”

I turned from them, felt my jaw tight, felt the wet on my face, my heart still pounding but that pounding now a hollow sound, nothing in me, and I looked up, saw shimmer in my tears the thin stars up there, that moon, saw it dance in a way I had no control over. Just dancing, shimmering.

“He’ll be back,” Unc whispered to Mom. “Just give me your hand, Eugenie. Give me your hand.”

Still she cried, a sound as soft as the wind in these trees, but sharp enough to cut through them in the same moment. My mom, crying, and I turned, my eyes to the sky, searching.

Here was Polaris, dancing.

I shivered, shivered hard and deep, shoulders to legs, through me some cold current, and I turned, walked toward where Unc knelt beside the log, his hand down inside, the sound of Mom’s crying up from beneath it.

Unc looked up at me.

I said, “We have to go,” and though I’d tried to hold it in, tried to make my words sound like they had some authority to them, they came out broken.

That was when she crawled out, quick breaths in and in, took Unc’s hand, struggled up, and stood.

She wiped at her eyes with the backs of her hands, still crying. “I’m sorry, Huger,” she managed, her words more broken than mine. She took a step toward me, and I could see her face crumpled up in the dark, her two arms out to me, her wanting to hold me.

I stepped away, turned from her, with my boot pushed through the weeds, toed at them. Then my foot hit it: the shotgun.

I leaned over, picked it up, cold in my hand, but nothing. There was no weight to it. Only that cold steel of the barrel.

I took in a deep breath, tried hard to settle myself and the tremble in my throat. I said, “This way,” and looked back up at the North Star.

And here was her hand taking up mine, the hand of a woman who’d kept truth from me my entire life, the hand of a woman who called herself my mother. And I took it, through no choice of my own, only that there was a man with a gun on horseback, bent on killing us.

Next came Unc’s hand at the small of my back, and I felt him loop his fingers around my belt again. The man who’d kept the same truth from me my whole life.

I started off, running.

Mom wasn’t whimpering any longer, and Unc wasn’t pushing. It was me, leading, and running, holding tight her hand, Unc right there behind me and holding on, right there.

I didn’t ask him where we were going, because I knew it was best never to ask him or Mom anything ever again, seeing as how they would lie to me on it, too scared to tell the truth, however ugly it might be. The truth for them was me, I knew: this kid they’d made, this kid who’d thought it was his own life he was living.

And now I started to thinking on the fact maybe my father, that man I’d always thought of as my father, the one who’d left once Unc’d moved in to lick his wounds, hadn’t done any wrong. Maybe he’d known all along who this kid was in his house. Maybe he’d known all along his wife’d cheated on him, so that the day his brother came hobbling back to Hungry Neck to start on healing the wounds inflicted by a woman who’d finally dealt with the truth of her husband’s fucking his brother’s wife, maybe that was the day my father’d finally made the decision to go: here, in his own trailer, was his wife and her lover, his own brother.

Maybe this man I’d always thought of as my father deserved still to be thought of as my father, because he’d looked at the truth, taken it in, dealt with it.

I didn’t want her hand in mine, didn’t want it there as we splashed through a low