My father called while I was pulling morning shots.
I hadn't spoken to him since the midnight conversation about Roe — the conversation that had ended with me hanging up and him saying please, Lark, let me explain, into a dead line. Weeks of silence. His texts had continued every morning — short, desperate, the texts of a man watching his daughter disappear behind a wall he'd built with his own hands — and I'd read every one and responded to none.
The phone vibrated against the counter. Dad. I stared at it through two shots and a steam cycle before picking up.
"I'm at Treeline," he said. "Outside."
I looked through the window. The Tacoma. Parked at the Union Station curb in a loading zone, the same truck I'd grown up in — 180,000 miles, a dent in the rear panel from a mule deer outside Georgetown, the bed still carrying the ghost of every piece of lumber and every bag of supplies he'd hauled up the Conifer road when he was the kind of man who built things instead of betting them.
