"Because it's not mine to bury," he said finally. "And it's not Claire's. You did a thing, and the law gets to know about it. That's how it has to be or none of the rest of it means anything. But I don't have to stand up in that office and ask them to throw everything at you, either. I got to choose that much. Last spring I chose wrong. I'm choosing now."
Danny looked down at the shirt in his arms. When he looked up again his eyes were full, and he did not try to hide it, and Wade thought he was braver than most grown men for that alone.
"I'll be ready at eight," the boy said.
* * *
He told Claire on Saturday night, at the kitchen table, after June was asleep. He told her all of it, the trailer and Lynette on the step and the shirt and what he had said by the woodpile, and she listened without interrupting, her hands wrapped around a mug of coffee gone cold. When he was finished she said, "I'm coming with you," and he said he had figured she would, and that was the first thing they had agreed on in three days.
On Monday the three of them drove to Lewistown in the cab of Wade's pickup with Danny in the middle, his knees jammed up against the dash, wearing a clean shirt that was not his father's flannel and his hair wet-combed flat. Nobody said much. The wheat stubble went by gold under a hard blue sky.
Tom Danner met them in the lobby of the sheriff's office. He was Claire's first cousin, a big, slow-spoken man with the Danner chin and a deputy's habit of letting silences sit until somebody filled them. He looked at the three of them standing together, at Wade, at his cousin, at the Ferris boy he had known since the boy was in diapers, and something in his face went very still.