was two counties over in an area bedridden by two decades of a failed blue-collar economy. A hundred years ago, it was some of the most productive farmland in the state. Now it was wild and overgrown, littered with shuttered plants, crumble-down mill houses, and singlewides on dirt tracks. Fields lay fallow and the forest pushed out scrub. Chimneys rose from piled debris. Kudzu slung long arms over phone lines as if to pull them down. That’s where Faith’s hideaway was, deep in the ruined green. It took two hours to find it. I stopped three times for directions, and the closer I got, the more the countryside seemed to sweat poverty and despair. The road twisted. Single-lane and cracked, it slipped between low hills and thick-smelling bogs, ended in a two-mile loop that wrapped the edges of a dead-end hollow with more cold shade than most. I was forty miles from Salisbury, one of the richest towns in the state, less than sixty from the silver towers of Charlotte, and I could have been in a different country.
