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Spencer snuggles deeper. “Which stars did I see last night, do you think? And the night before that?”
That damned agony gives another lurch in Silas’s belly before rising like bile. “I’m not sure,” he chokes. But he knows how bright the night sky is here in the Sierra. He knows how the entire Milky Way can glow. “Did they help you see at all?”
Spencer lifts his head and thinks about this. “The first night they were like a night-light, they were so bright.” He pauses, and his face clouds. “Last night was darker.”
“It got cloudy,” Silas confirms. “Getting ready to rain.”
“And Cam wasn’t talking anymore.”
Silas stifles a low sob. He hasn’t pressed Spencer yet for detailed information, and he isn’t sure he’s ready to learn more now, either. But Spencer isn’t done sharing. “Before that we pretended we were playingGreen Laser,” he tells Silas, “in the tunnel.” He’s talking about their favorite game app on Silas’s phone, and he immediately pictures the black lines of the maze the boys love to navigate their little green avatars through.
“You explored the mine, huh?” he manages.
“We just pretended that, too. Sitting against the rock wall. Cam was too tired.” He adjusts under the blanket, pulling his knees up tighter to his small chest. “And after a while,” he adds, “Cam didn’t even wanna pretend anymore.”
“Is that when you left the mine? To go get help?” Silas works hard not to picture Spencer, facedown in the marsh of the pond, where Meg found him.
Spencer nods. “With Cam so quiet, it felt like game over inGreen Laser, but with no restart button.” He kind of laughs at himself. “That’s silly, but I decided it was time to stop pretending.”
“That was right,” Silas manages tightly. “That was the right thing to do.” He draws him in closer, squeezing him to his side almost roughly, trying to let the solid warmth of him be enough. To let his son’s well-being—histwosons’ well-being—make up for all the wrongs Silas has done. It doesn’t, it can’t, but that’s not on Spencer. Spencer is breaking the cycle. “You did so good, son,” he tells him. “You saved him, you know that, right? You saved your brother’s life.”
MEG
Meg wakes at home to the sound of the automatic coffee maker percolating. She was dreaming of rain, and for a moment she’s disoriented by the sight of the sun filtering through her blinds. Storms in the Sierra are like that; they commence and then they break with identical flair, their weakness for high drama unmatched.
She’s told that Danny is still at the station awaiting bail; there’s time to see him, should she have anything to say. Questions arise in a flood: How could he have lived, all this time, with what he did? Howcould he have borne witness to Jessica’s mother’s grief and not shared what he knew about her daughter’s final resting place? How could Meg have? And how could they all have justified their roles in the destructive triangle they had all become entangled in?
But when she gets to the dark little trailer in the parking lot of the sheriff station for what they call a reception visit, she finds herself overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of fifteen years’ worth of secrets and lies. She starts with what feels like the smallest piece of the puzzle, intending to work her way outward.
“Why did you stay with me all these years?” she asks him. Did Danny ever really love her at all? She wants him to connect the dots for her, orienting her like Silas used to, so long ago, with the constellation book in his bedroom at the lodge. Help her see where their stars all crossed paths.Please,Meg implores silently,explain to me how a man I’ve known almost all my life, a good man, a community servant, could have gotten from this particular point A to point B.
Danny doesn’t meet her gaze, his eyes trained on the countertop he’s resting his cuffed hands upon. “Jessica could never seem to keep Silas’s attention,” he tells the countertop. “In life, I mean. No matter how much I wished she could.” He finds the courage to look up, and she can see that a deep bitterness still shines in his eyes. It makes them look foreign to her. “But in the end, it was her death that managed to destroy you two. I couldn’t let that be in vain, could I?”
Meg stares at him, horror-struck. He almost looks ... vindicated. In light of what he did to Jessica, she can see more plainly now what he did toher, too...what, essentially, she allowed him to do: dismissing her ideas about going to college, telling her that victim advocacy wasn’t for her, casting Silas as the villain for the past fifteen years. She felt it for so long, like an ache under the skin. That viselike grip of manipulation. How had Silas described it, that day at the mine? Being boxed in.
She decides she won’t allow him to manipulate her or her reality for a single second more. She walks away without another word, taking thelong way home along the river, past the trestle Silas once dared her to climb, past the forest road where the Jeep got stuck in the springtime mud. She doesn’t know how it will end for Danny, whether he will serve time after what promises to be an extensive and grueling trial. But she knows his departure from her life will leave a void, because she already feels a vast and satisfying sense of space.
After so many years of denying herself room to move on, she feels lighter than air.
She realizes she’s gripping the steering wheel too tightly as she watches the cloud banks shift, finding new sky to darken. Despite the patches of blue, serious weather is still on the horizon, and this doesn’t feel over. She wants to call Silas. She wants to be wherever he is now, in Reno at Washoe Medical, facing whatever it is he’s facing with his kids. When she gets home, she calls the hospital instead, where identifying herself as the SAR member who found the Matheson boys earns her a basic report on Cameron and Spencer. She tells herself that’s enough.
It’s been fifteen years. She can wait a bit longer.
She’s called in to the sheriff’s department the next day for questioning. Sheriff Walters has scheduled this appointment one hour prior to the official Matheson search debriefing, and already members of her team mill around, buzzing about the search while they get the coffee on. She hears the nameCairnswhispered from several corners of the room, but her fellow volunteers have the grace to pinch their lips closed as she passes by. A few offer sympathetic smiles. Others look at their shoes. McCrady takes the initiative to clap his hand on her shoulder. “Chin up, kiddo.”
She walks directly into Walters’s office and stops. What she thought would be a simple interview includes the county prosecutor, her paralegal team, several deputies, plus Walters, Lieutenant Santos, and a techaid she doesn’t know setting up a voice recorder on the foldout table in front of her. She sits, equal parts nervous and sad. Walters turns on the recorder. He tells her to start from the beginning.
She fiddles with her hands as she talks: flat down on the tabletop, then palms up, then folded together before she finally settles on crossing her arms over her chest. She looks at Walters as steadily as she can, and once she gets used to the whir of the recorder, it feels good to pry this final wedge of truth from the dark place it’s inhabited until now. She extracts each answer from her mind one by one, admiring the shiny legitimacy of them from every side.It wasDanny who invited Jessica on the hike. He pushed it on me and Silas. Yeah, Danny had an agenda, but Silas was the one who scared her. It was kind of his thing.
“And after she ran away, then what?” Walters’s follow-up questions are harder to answer, each one a pill Meg’s so painstakingly swallowed. Danny may have committed the unthinkable up on that cliffside, but Meg is not without culpability.
“We all split up to find her.”
Santos sits quietly beside him, taking notes.
“But at some point, you and Silas crossed paths again?”
Meg looks down at her crossed arms. “And when we did, we hid ourselves out of view,” she says softly. “We wanted to be alone.” She looks up, looks Walters in the eye. “When we scared her off, that was the last time Silas and I ever saw her,” she says tightly, regret thick enough to coat her throat.
