Page 21 of Not a Word

“I have no idea. I’m guessing she’s in shock. She knows something bad’s happened and the longer she puts off coming back here, the longer she doesn’t have to know how bad.”

McCabe couldn’t send her minions out to find her the way she’d had them find me, unless they had some way to track her location from her cell phone. Mom didn’t drive so there was no car to hunt down. While McCabe figured out what to do about that, she pursued a different line of questioning.

“Did you know your father was having an affair?”

“I don’t know that he was.” She gave me a look she might give a three-year-old. Without saying a word, she was asking if I had some other explanation for the scene upstairs. “Okay, I get how it looks and I can’t think of any explanation other than . . . my dad was seeing someone else.” In the world of euphemisms, I am willing to admit that “seeing” was pretty lame.

“No inkling? Nothing?”

I shook my head. “Look, I’m still reeling, okay? I haven’t been given a chance to shed so much as a single tear yet because you’ve got a job to do, and I get that, but I’m trying the best I can here. I didn’t know my father was seeing someone else, I have no clue who that dead woman in bed with him is, and if you’d told me a week ago that he was cheating on my mom I would have—”

I stopped myself short.

“Would have what?” McCabe asked.

I found myself, in that moment, reassessing everything I had thought to be true. Slowly, I said, “I would have thought that maybe it was possible.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because . . .” I was finding it hard to put into words. Not because I didn’t know what the words were, but because saying them out loud made them real.

“Because I don’t know that they were ever really happy,” I said. “At least, not for as long as I can remember.” I shook my head slowly. “I guess my dad was fooling around, must have felt like shit about it, shot this woman and then shot himself. I’ve got to find a way to live with that. To help my mother live with that. To explain that to my son, who adored his grandfather, who looked up to him, who saw him as a role model.”

“He left a note,” McCabe said.

“He what?”

“Your father left a note. On the bedside table, under his phone. Written on personal stationery, a notepad with his name across the top.”

She took out her phone, showed me a photo she’d taken of the note. It read: I am so sorry for the hurt I have caused. I did this. I bear all responsibility. Brent.

I was a tire that had just run over a nail. Slowly deflating, the life slipping out of me.

“Jesus,” I whispered.

“Is that your father’s handwriting?” McCabe asked.

My eyes were getting misty and I had to blink several times to be able to bring the photo on her phone into focus. “Can you make it bigger?”

McCabe used two fingers to magnify the image.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re sure?”

“That’s his handwriting. I’m sure of it.”

McCabe exited her photos app and put the phone away. “You mentioned a brother,” she said.

“Holden. Older than me. By a year.”

“Any other siblings?” she asked.

“No.”

She had her notepad in hand. “Give me your mother’s cell number.”

I complied.