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He set his foot down and Sophie stretched behind him. “Where are we?” she asked over the rumble of the idling engine. Desert grasslands stretched out toward the foothills that surrounded them.
“You’ve never been here?”
She looked around in confusion until she finally saw the sign that pointed toward the east. Providence, it said. She set her mouth and nodded. “Only once.”
“When they found them?”
“Yes.” His back was a straight, hard line against her.
“I was here today. For the first time since...”
She nodded, but didn’t say anything. He’d have to spend the whole day here tomorrow, but she hadn’t planned on ever coming back. Still, it was something being out here at dusk, the quiet broken only by the occasional car that passed.
“Would you mind?” he asked, and she knew what he meant, but didn’t know how to answer it. She didn’t want to go, but she was ashamed of that. She was too strong to cower away from something so harmless, and yet she wasn’t strong at all, was she?
Sophie swallowed her reluctance and nodded. “Not at all.”
He turned the bike down a lonely ranch road and off they went, driving toward the darkness this time. The first stars were just rising above the hills. The sky was all purple and blue here, just edging toward black. By the time he slowed the bike and pulled into a gravel lot, the sunset was nothing more than a lightness at their backs.
It was twilight, her favorite time. Not dark enough to be night, but nothing close to day. But when she took off her helmet, the twilight didn’t feel peaceful. It felt eerie. Too quiet now that they were far away from the highway and close to that place.
“How many people will be here tomorrow?” she asked just to chase off the silence.
“I have no idea. Hell, I’d thought it would be no more than however many people are on that damn board, but now... Who knows.”
“The lawsuit,” she murmured.
“Yeah. Not great timing on your brother’s part. Though it’ll make my mom happy if we’re mobbed. She’s been under the impression that the whole town will turn out to honor him.”
“Why?” she asked in surprise. He’d been dead for twenty-five years and even though his grandfather had been an important man around town, Wyatt Bishop had just been an average citizen.
“Why?” he repeated with a humorless laugh. He tipped his head up to look toward the stars. “Because she’s just as delusional as she’s always been.”
“I know she’s always been, um...staunchly defensive of him.”
“Jesus, it’s more than that. Do you know that after he disappeared, she had my brother and I convinced that our father had been kidnapped and held hostage and that’s why he wasn’t home?”
“Kidnapped?” she asked in shock. “What do you mean?”
“I mean after he’d been gone a week and there was no sign of him, she decided something had happened to him. That he’d seen some sort of corruption or crime and he’d been taken to keep him quiet.”
“But...why would she think that?”
“Because she needed him not to have abandoned her. More than that, she needed him to be a hero. She always did. So she made him into a hero however she could.”
“But he was with my mom. What did that have to do with anything?”
He shrugged. “For a while, my mom just left her out of the story. She was convinced your mom’s disappearance had nothing to do with Dad. It was coincidence. And she had us convinced, too. But I finally wised up.”
Sophie heard the bitter note in his voice and recognized it. “School?”
“Yeah. There were a lot of stories. I guess you know that.”
“I do.” She’d always assumed they’d been crueler to her because it was so easy to call a woman a slut, a whore, a jezebel, a man-stealer. Not to mention all the things they’d called her dad, too. But she realized then that Alex and Shane had been older, so they’d probably heard more. There were only so many names that a first-grader knew, and by the time she’d gotten older, the story had had less shine on it.
“I’d say kids are cruel, but you know that,” she said softly.
“Kids are cruel, but it was way crueler for my mom to give us that kind of hope.”
