Every day Brandon goes to his in-laws’ place hoping to see his daughter. The route takes him past the tidy ranch where his wife was born. And the ambitious clapboard house she left to marry Brandon—before he came back from the Gulf with PTSD and she fled and never came back or was found. Now her parents live in a white-columned monstrosity on land shorn of its old pines. He’s been to rehab. He wants his daughter back. Every day he marches up his in-laws’ yard where the sod is laid in strips and never seems to take root.