Page 58 of Thunder

In the months since the freeze-out I'd let myself forget that before it all broke, we were good.

That having sisters, after twenty years of being an only child talking to my daddy's ashes, was the best thing that ever landed in my lap.

We lost all of that in an afternoon.

And sitting here now, watching Dakota wipe laugh-tears off her face and reach over to jiggle Braxton's foot, I understand exactly how much I've been starving, and exactly how careful I have to be not to let it show.

If I let them see how badly I've missed this, I might not stop crying long enough to get through what we actually came here to do.

Grace catches me watching. She doesn't say anything.

She just bumps my knee with hers under the table, once, and goes back to her eggs, and it's the smallest thing, and it nearly finishes me.

Then Dakota sets down her fork and wipes her hands and says, low, "Okay. I'm gonna say it."

The table goes quiet. Even Braxton, like he knows.

"The investigator won't stop." Her jaw is tight. "I've called him off four times. Told him the family's moved on, told him to drop it, told him I don't need him anymore. He won't. He says—" she glances around, drops her voice further, "—he says he found a discrepancy in the timeline he can't let go of. That the story of where Mom went doesn't hold up. And he's right, it doesn't hold up, because it's not true, because we all know exactly where she⁠—"

She stops. Breathes. "He's going to keep pulling until he finds something. And we all know what's out there to find."

Nobody says the word. We don't have to.

It sits in the middle of the table next to the syrup, that shallow patch of ground out past Big Spring, and every one of us can see it.

Grace speaks up then, quiet, rocking Braxton without looking down at him. "I've gone back and forth on this more times than I can count," she says. "Part of me wants it all out. The truth, finally, no more secrets, let the law sort it and let the chips fall. I'm so tired of what the lie's already cost us."

She looks at her sons, then at each of us. "But then I look at them. I think about Waylon and Braxton growing up with their granddad in prison, and Marlena too, the whole family torn up in the papers, everybody in three counties knowing our business. And I think about Mom."

Her voice thins.

"She died a long time before her body went into the ground. She wasn’t the woman who raised us. She lost herself when Pops moved on. She let it consume her. Putting Dad in prison doesn't give her back. It just makes a second tragedy out of the first one."

She swallows. "So I'm in. God help me, I'm in. We bury it."

"So here's where I'm at," Dakota goes on, and her voice shakes just slightly, "and I hate it. I want you all to know I hate it so much I could scream. But I've been up every night for two weeks turning it over, and there's only one way this ends that doesn't end with Dad in prison."

"We lie to him," Grace says quietly.

"We lie to him." Dakota nods. "I give him a story so complete he's got no thread left to pull. I tell him I found her myself. I made contact. She's alive, she's fine, she was out of the country the whole time, Mexico, someplace, somewhere with bad cell service and no reason to call home, and she doesn't want to be found, and the family's made peace with it, and the case is closed. Final payment, thank you for your service, we're done."

Shiver's voice comes off the phone, heavy. "You think he'll buy it?"

"He'll buy it if I sell it right. He wants to close it too, deep down. Nobody wants to be the man who kept digging on a family that asked him to stop."

Dakota's eyes come up, and they land on me, and there's something raw in them. "But I need us all agreed. Because if we do this, we're—" She can't finish it.

"We're doing what Dad did," I say.

It comes out of me before I can stop it, and the table looks at me, and I hold Dakota's eyes because somebody has to say it out loud.

"We're doing exactly what Dad did," I say again, quieter.

"We're burying it. We're lying to protect the people we love. Every ounce of the hate we've been carrying for him this whole time, for covering it up, for keeping the secret, and we're about to pick up that same shovel."

My throat's tight. "I'm not saying don't. I'm saying let's at least be honest with each other about what we're becoming, because I don't think I can stand one more lie in this family that we don't at least tell each other the truth about first."

The silence stretches.