“If you mention my name again, I promise you’ll be going straight back to prison.”

My sister said it calmly, the way you’d tell someone their shoe was untied.

Then she tossed a thick white envelope onto the grass in front of my feet. It landed with a soft thump. One corner had torn open, and I could see the edges of hundred-dollar bills inside, wrapped in a rubber band.

I was standing in Opal Hargrove’s backyard in Worthington with a wet bedsheet in my hands and two clothespins in my mouth. I took the clothespins out slowly.

It had been six weeks since my release from prison.

Six weeks, and the sound of a slamming door still made me sit straight up in bed at night with my heart pounding. Six weeks, and I still asked permission before I opened the refrigerator.

Now Monica was standing in front of me, outside a house that wasn’t mine, threatening to send me back.

And on her wrist was our father’s watch.

The gold one, with the scratched face and the brown leather band. The one he’d pressed into my hand in the hospital, two days before he died, and said, “You keep this, Becky. You’re the one who’ll keep time for everybody.”

The one I’d left in the top drawer of my nightstand the morning the police came to my house.

Monica saw me looking at it. She didn’t cover it up. She turned her wrist a little so the sun caught the glass.

“Pick up your money,” I told her. My voice was shaking, but I kept going. “You already took four years of my life. You’re not buying the ones I have left.”

Monica smiled. It was a cold, small smile. I’d seen it before, when we were kids, right before she told our mother that I was the one who broke the lamp.

“You still think you can win,” she said.