Flagstaff taught me how to be alone without falling apart, which is a skill I did not know I needed until I needed it every day.
The lodge job was the first one. I cleaned rooms in the morning and served breakfast in a dining room with big windows that looked out at pine trees, and the guests were mostly people on vacation, which meant they were mostly happy, which meant I had to be happy too, and I learned how to do that on very little sleep. I learned the names of the regulars. I learned which ones tipped and which ones did not, and I learned not to care about the second group, because caring about it would have cost me more than the tips were worth.
In the afternoons, when my shift ended, I walked. Flagstaff is a walking town if you are poor, and I walked everywhere β to the library, to the grocery store, to the park where I sat on a bench and read my father's papers for the hundredth time. I read the trust until I could recite parts of it. I read the deed until the legal description sounded like a poem. I read the debt claim until I hated it, and then I read it again, because hating something is not the same as understanding it.
One afternoon in the library, I met a woman named June who worked at a legal aid office, and she listened to my story for twenty minutes without interrupting, which was more than any lawyer had done. She told me that legal aid could not take my case β it was too big, too complicated, too far outside what they did β but she gave me a list of things to read, and she told me to keep a timeline, and she told me something I have never forgotten.
"Write down everything with a date," she said. "Lawyers love dates. Judges love dates. Memory is soft. Dates are hard."
So I started a timeline. I wrote it in a notebook I bought at a drugstore, and I filled it in from memory and from papers: the date of my father's death, the date of the debt claim, the date of Mr. Fenn's crash, the date De Sousa got the files, the date the locks were changed, the date I turned eighteen. I wrote it all down, and when I was done, I looked at it, and I saw something I had not seen before: a pattern. Not a proof. A pattern. Things happening too fast, too neatly, too soon after someone died.
I showed the timeline to Carl on a Sunday call. He was quiet for a long time, and then he said, "Keep that notebook, Emily. And keep adding to it. Patterns are how you catch careful thieves."
The seasons changed. Summer became fall, and the lodge slowed down, and I moved to the warehouse. The warehouse was a different kind of alone. It was loud and cold and full of people who did not talk much, and I liked it, in a strange way, because nobody asked me about my life, and nobody expected me to smile. I packed boxes. I stacked boxes. I learned how to lift properly and how to keep going when my back hurt, and I saved money, and I sent some of it to my aunt, because she had taken me in and I did not want to be a debt in her life.
In the warehouse, I met a man named Tomas who had lost a business once, in New Mexico. He did not tell me the details, not at first, but one night, over coffee in the break room, he told me that a man had come to him with papers after his brother died, and that he had signed them because he was grieving and tired, and that he had regretted it every day since.
"Don't sign anything," Tomas said, and he said it with the urgency of a man who had learned the lesson the hard way. "No matter what they offer you. No matter how tired you are. Don't sign."
I told him I wouldn't. I told him my father had taught me the same lesson when I was fifteen. Tomas nodded, and he said, "Then your father was a smart man. And you're going to be all right, even if it doesn't feel like it right now."
I did not feel all right. I felt tired, and young, and very far from Phoenix, and very far from the shop, and very far from the girl I had been at fifteen, sitting at the kitchen table with her father. But I kept the notebook, and I kept the timeline, and I kept the letter, and I kept going, because going was the only thing I knew how to do.
When spring came, I went back to waitressing, because waitressing paid better than the warehouse, and because I was good at it, and because being good at something, even something small, felt like proof that I was not entirely lost. I worked in a diner off the highway, and I carried trays, and I smiled, and I saved, and I waited for a road to open that was not another season, another warehouse, another winter.
It did not open. Not that year. But I was learning something, even if I did not know it yet: that being alone and being strong are not the same thing, and that I had confused them for a long time, and that the confusion was going to cost me until I unlearned it.