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My hands tremble as I pick them up one by one, sifting through the horrors frozen in time.

Each one tells the same story, their contents more damning than the last, faces pale, eyes vacant, postures stiff with the kind of fear I recognize. All these little girls. Faces too young and too small to bear the kind of darkness captured in those frames. I can tell some pictures were taken here, in this house, and some are in rooms I don’t recognize.

My stomach churns, the acid rising hot and bitter in my throat.

There were so many children.

How could I think it was only me?

At the bottom of the box lies an envelope, yellowed and brittle. My father’s handwriting stretches across the front in bold, jagged script:

The Covenant: Deliverance.

The word slithers through me, cold and slick, coiling around my ribs and squeezing. Deliverance. As though any part of what he did, what they did, could be sanctified.

With shaking hands, I rip the envelope open, the brittle paper tearing like skin.

Two items spill out onto the bedspread.

The first is a torn photograph. Its edges are jagged, as though someone ripped it from an album in a hurry. I lift it with trembling fingers and study the image.

Two men stand outside a church, its whitewashed walls gleaming in the sunlight behind them. My father is there, his sharp features and cold, calculating smile unmistakable.

But beside him is a man I don’t recognize. His face is blurred slightly from age and light, but there’s something about him that feels familiar, even if I can’t place it.

He’s tall, broader than my father, his hair swept back neatly. His hand rests on the shoulder of a child, their face turned slightly away.

My pulse stutters.

It’s me.

Who is he?

I lean closer, my breath fogging the surface of the photo as though I can force the man’s features into focus. A memory flickers at the edge of my mind, a shadow, a voice, the sound of heavy boots pacing across the hardwood floor.

Clyde’s uncle? A family friend? Someone from the church?

The questions claw at me, desperate for answers, but none come.

If he was part of it, why can’t I remember him?

And why would my father save this photograph?

The second item falls from the envelope, a note, written in my father’s unmistakable scrawl. The words crawl across the page like insects, small and sharp, each one cutting deeper than the last.

Proof lies with Kerr. Deliverance requires sacrifice.

Kerr.

The name hits me like a blow to the chest, the force of it knocking the air from my lungs. My fingers curl around the note, the paper crumpling as my grip tightens. The room tilts again, the walls pressing closer.

Memories I didn’t know I had surge forward. Cruel and jagged as shards of glass. His voice, low and gravelly, whispering words I can’t make out. His hands, large, calloused, gripping my arms too tightly. The glint of his belt buckle as it caught the light.

I lurch off the bed and stumble toward the trash can, the bile rising so fast I barely make it. My body convulses as I dry heave, my throat burning with the force of it. Tears blur my vision, hot and relentless, but I refuse to let them fall.

Not for him.

Not for any of this.