“Why do you have to be so hard on him, Ezra? He’s just a boy, and a very brave one at that.”

I crept to the door, cracked it, and peered out. My father had a drink in his hand. His tie was loose and he made my mother look very small in the dim light.

“He’s no fucking hero,” my father had said. “No matter what the papers say.”

He knocked back the drink and put a hand on the wall above my mother’s head. Somehow he knew my shame, the burning in my mind that kept me up at night. I didn’t know how he knew, but he did, and I felt hot tears slide down my cheeks.

“He’s having a tough time, Ezra. He needs to know that you’re proud of him.”

“Proud! Ha! He’s just a dumb-ass kid who should have known better. It’s sick the way you coddle him…”

I didn’t hear the rest. I closed the door and climbed back into bed.

He didn’t know.

Nobody did. Just me. And him.

I seen you watchin’…

I opened my eyes, done because I could do no more. Now I had to tell Vanessa how I’d failed her. She was raped at the age of fifteen and I’d watched it happen, allowed it to happen.

I should have done more.

I looked up at her house and felt a sudden twist of nausea. A man was standing on her porch, staring down at me. I’d not seen him come out. Had no idea how long he’d stood there. Who he was or why he was there. He came slowly down the steps. I climbed from the truck and met him at the front of it. He was younger than I, probably thirty, with thick brown hair and close-set eyes. He was tall, with big shoulders and large, heavy hands that hung like iron from the sleeves of a denim shirt.

“Ms. Stolen doesn’t want to see you,” he said without preamble, one hand out, fingers spread. “She wants you to leave.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“That’s none of your business.” He stepped closer, his hand mere inches from my chest. “Why don’t you just get back in your truck and go home?”

I looked past him and saw Vanessa’s face, formless in the kitchen window. I seen you watchin’…

“No,” I said, angry. “This is none of your business.” I gestured sharply, meaning the farm, myself, Vanessa… I had things to say, and I meant them to be said. “I want to talk to Vanessa.” I took a step forward and his hand settled like a weight onto my chest.

“I don’t think so.”

Suddenly, I was filled with rage, bursting with it. All the frustrations of my life seemed to boil up within a matter of seconds, and this nameless man represented all of it.

“Get out of my way.” Low, cold, and dangerous, even to my ears.

“Not gonna happen,” he said.

Anger. Rage. I was alive with it, like I might explode. His face was hard and heavy, and the pressure was building inside of me. The murder. The investigation. The searing need to talk to Vanessa. In a flash that smelled of prophecy, I saw Detective Mills cuffing Jean, and the way my baby sister sat in a darkened cell and sawed at her wrists with a piece of dull jagged metal. Everything was coming apart, and all I had was this moment and the fury that defined it with such perfect clarity. So that when he pushed me, I decked him, unloaded on him. And the shock of impact that traveled up my arm was a goddamn gift. He dropped to the ground, and I stood over him, hoping that he would get up and give me an excuse. But when he rolled off his back, sitting on the dirt, he looked surprised and hurt. “Jeez, mister. Why did you do that?” Suddenly, he looked much younger. More like twenty.

My anger bled away and left me old.

Then Vanessa was leaping off the porch, standing before me, hands on her hips. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Jackson? What is your fucking problem?”

I felt confused, drunk.

“How dare you come here and behave like that? I want you to leave. Right now. Go home. Get out of here.”

She was helping him to his feet, her hand tiny in his. I saw them sleeping together, and felt new pain.

“I wanted to talk to you,” I said, and it sounded lame even to me. I was lost, hands out.

“I told you not to follow me.”

“This time is different.”

But she walked away from me, until she was on the porch, holding the door for the man to move inside. Then she turned and looked down on me as if from a great height, and the porch light held her in its insubstantial grasp.

“Get off my property, Jackson. I mean it!”

I stood dumbly, awed by the pain that welled up to consume me; but it was not until she was gone, the door between us like a rip in the universe, that I realized she’d been wearing a purple dress.

Through the window I saw her at the kitchen table. She was crying, convulsing beneath the hand he’d placed on her shoulder.

I left, heavy with the words she refused to let me say. And it was only as I turned off the farm and onto the black pavement that I realized I had no bed to go to. So I went to the office, to Ezra’s space, and with one lamp burning, tossing its warm light on the ceiling, I stretched out on the leather couch and pulled Bone onto my chest. He closed his eyes and was soon asleep. I stared at the ceiling until well after midnight, but my eyes kept wandering to the long, antique rug. I reached out my hand to touch it.

I thought of the safe and of the secrets my father had kept.

Eventually, sleep found me, but not before I realized that it was Monday and I had to be in court. That did not seem real.

CHAPTER 16

I woke in the dark; I didn’t know where I was and I didn’t care. I held on to the dream: two hands entwined, passing over green fields, the sounds of a dog and of laughter; a flash of blue skies that refused to end, and blond hair, like silk, against my face.

The dream had been of Vanessa, and of things that would never be.

There had been a child, too, with golden skin and her mother’s cornflower eyes. She was four or five. She was radiant.

Tell me the story, Daddy… Skipping through tall grass.

What story?

She laughed. You know what story, Daddy. My favorite…

But I didn’t know. There was no story, no favorite; nor would there be. The dream was gone. I’d thought Vanessa would always be there. I’d thought that I had time. For some reason, I’d believed that things would simply work out.

What a fucking idiot.

Tell me the story, Daddy

I sat up and swung my legs off the couch, rubbed my hands across my face. It’s never too late, I told myself; but in the dark the words felt lame, and I thought of the boy I’d once been. Then I said it again, out loud, stronger. “It’s never too late.”

I looked at my watch. Five-fifteen. Monday. Three days ago, I’d stood above my father’s corpse. Now Ezra was gone, and so, too, the comfort of illusion; Vanessa had been so right about that. He’d been the structure and the definition, and I wondered where such power had come from. Was it a gift I’d made to him or something that he’d stolen? In the end, it didn’t matter. My life was a house of cards, and the wind of Ezra’s passing had knocked it flat.

I pulled on my shoes, thinking that the day already felt very much like Monday.

I found Bone on the overstuffed chair and guessed I’d been snoring. He was warm and loose as I carried him to the truck. At home, I put on a pot of coffee to perk while I showered and dressed. When I got out, Barbara was waiting. She sat on the counter, wrapped in the same fleece robe she’d worn the day before. She looked like hell.

“Good morning,” I said noncommittally. She watched me as I toweled off, and I wondered what she saw.

“Hardly,” she replied. “I didn’t really sleep.” I wrapped the towel around my waist, and she stated the obvious. “You didn’t come home.”

“No.” I felt the need to say more but decided not to.

“Were you…” She hesitated. “Were you at her place?”