Gabe saw himself at four, asleep under a thin blanket on his grandfather’s couch while adults shouted Ellie’s name into the dark. Saw his mother’s face the next morning, gray and emptied out. Saw the way she had clung to him for months afterward, the way she flinched whenever he played near the creek.
“He threatened me,” Diane said. “And I believed him because I knew exactly what he was.”
“You should’ve told me.”
“I was trying to keep you alive.”
The anger in Gabe had nowhere to go. It rushed at his father, at the sheriff’s office, at the town, at every Sunday dinner where Arnold had carved ham while people passed him the rolls. It rushed at himself for not seeing sooner, though he’d been a child. Most of all it rushed toward the dead man who had taken Ellie and then gone on living, respected and praised, while the rest of them shaped their lives around a wound that never closed.
On the porch, the screen door banged open.
Ray stepped in. “What’s going on in here?”
Diane wiped her face quickly, but Gabe no longer cared about maintaining the old arrangements.
“Did you know?” he asked.
Ray frowned. “Know what?”
“What he did to Mom. What he did to Ellie.”
The silence that followed answered before Ray could.
His father’s face hardened, then sagged around the edges.
“I knew your mama hated him,” Ray said. “I knew something wasn’t right. But—”
“But what?”
Ray looked at the floor. “I didn’t know how bad.”
“You didn’t want to know.”
“That’s enough,” Ray snapped, some old reflex reasserting itself. “You don’t get to judge everything you don’t understand.”
Gabe took one step toward him. “My sister disappeared from his house, and you let that man sit at our table for fourteen years.”
Ray’s voice rose too. “He was my father!”
“And she was your daughter!”
Diane flinched at the volume. Gabe saw it and pulled himself back by force
