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One day, I pass him in the hallway. His locker’s open. Just for a second, I see a photo inside, creased, softened from too much holding.

Cindy.

Her smile. Small and fragile. Frozen in time.

He closes the door before I can say anything.

And I keep walking. It’s easier for me that way.

That’s what I usually did when it came to Clyde. Except once. It was near the end of the first week back. I catch him sitting alone on the bleachers after the final bell. Long after everyone else has gone. I don’t know what makes me stop. Maybe it’s the way he’s just sitting there, not crying, not staring at his phone, just sitting like he’s waiting for something that isn’t coming. I sit down a few feet away. Neither of us say anything for a long time. “She was kind,” I say. I figure he’s tired of hearing how sorry everyone is. He nods slow, like the words cost him something to receive them. That’s all. We sit there until the sun falls and then he slides forward off the bleachers and I watch him walk away.

But now, holding her photograph in my hands, I wonder if I made a mistake.

I wonder if he knew.

Did she confide in him, and he didn’t do anything?

Did he suspect, even then, that there was more to Cindy’s story?

At one time, Cindy was the kind of girl who always offered a hand, even when the job was too big for her tiny fingers. She didn’t care, she just wanted to help. She was the one who shone bright, who danced around, and squealed with laughter. But then something started to change. She stopped smiling and laughing. She stopped dancing.

Did Clyde know?

Once Clyde stopped grieving his sister’s death, something changed. Not all at once, but enough to notice. He stopped being a normal high school junior and started turning into someone else entirely. No more school clubs. No more after-school hangouts or football games. Just books. Grades. Plans. A single-minded focus to get the hell out of Hurricane.

And he did.

But as we both know, he came back.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-TWO

I let the photograph slip from my fingers, my chest tightening as my breath comes hard and uneven. The edges of the room blur, like even the walls can’t stand to hold what I’ve just seen.

My mind spins, grasping at scraps of memory I buried deep, years ago.

I can hear myself breathing, sharp, ragged, the sound too loud in the stillness, drowning out the soft, familiar creaks of the old house shifting around me.

I wasn’t the only one.

All this time, I’ve told myself I stayed in this town out of duty, out of guilt. That I didn’t leave because I couldn’t abandon the life I’d built here, no matter the pain I had endured. This was my home, the clinic, the farm, the small routines that kept me tethered to something that felt solid.

But now I see the truth.

It wasn’t duty. It wasn’t guilt.

It was fear.

I locked it all away, deep in the recesses of my mind, because knowing was too much to carry. I told myself what happened to me was normal. That a father’s love was supposed to break you, to hollow you out and make you something quiet and obedient.

I’d convinced myself I was the only one suffering.

But I was wrong.

This goes beyond me.

My knees hit the edge of the bed as I stumble backward, my legs too unsteady to hold me. I sink onto the mattress, its springs groaning beneath me, and gather the rest of the photographs from the box. They spill across the bedspread like fallen leaves, a cascade of truths I can no longer outrun.