Chapter 2 : The parking lot at Willow Bend was laid out like everything else about the club — deliberately. There was the members' row, shaded, close to the door, with brass plaques for the old families. There was the guests' row, in the sun. And the

Mara had parked in the guests' row. She always did. Three years of coming there and she'd never once put the car in the members' row, even though the receptionist at the gate had finally stopped asking and just waved her through. She'd told herself it was habit. She knew it was because if she parked in the members' row, Hollis would see it, and there would be a conversation.

She sat in the car with the engine off and the AC not running and the July sun turning the cabin into a slow oven, and she replayed the plastic chit in Renata Cole's hand and the way the room had gone quiet and the way the two members at her own table had turned their chairs.

She didn't cry. She waited for it. It didn't come.

Her phone rang.

"Hey," she said.

"Mara." A pause. "It's Dee." Daniel's widow — her sister-in-law, if you could call it that, since she'd only been married to Daniel for eleven months — was named Deirdre, but nobody had called her that in years.

"Hey, Dee."

"Someone from the club called your dad," Dee said. "Hollis's wife called Susan, and Susan called your dad, and your dad called me, and I am telling you right now I am not calling you to yell at you, I'm calling you because your dad is about to."

"Yeah."

"Mara. What the hell happened?"

So she told her. Standing in the parking lot, one hand on the hot black hood of the car so the metal could burn her palm and give her something else to feel while she talked. The tray. The greeting. The front desk. The chit. The slap — she told Dee about the slap the way you report a fact, no adjectives, and Dee went quiet on the other end for a long stretch.

"You need to call him," Dee said finally. "You need to call him before he hears it from Hollis's version."

"I know."

"And Mara — listen. Whatever's in the file, whatever the second signature is — you make them show you the paper. You don't accept any version anybody tells you. You make them show you the paper." Dee had worked front-desk and then member services for four years before Daniel died. She knew how the club ran. She'd left the year he passed. "They always have the paper. They just don't always show it."

"Yeah."

"Call your dad."

"Okay."

She called her father from the Wendy's parking lot six miles out of town, because she was not going to do it with the club still in her rearview mirror.

Robert Ellison Senior, seventy-two, retired high school shop teacher, had remarried nine years ago and moved to a double-wide on four acres east of town where he kept a garden and a small tractor and did not, as a rule, get involved in Ellison family politics. He had been, for the past two years, ignoring a great deal of Hollis Ellison on the subject of the club. Mara had heard the version he'd been sold: that the club had quietly revoked Daniel's family seat after the funeral, that Hollis had been "fighting to keep it in the family," that Mara's ongoing presence at Willow Bend was a matter of Hollis's intercession.

She had believed it, too. Everyone had. That was the part she was still working on.

"Mara," her father said, instead of hello. "What did you do."

She told him.