He just looked at it and said, "Now, you know what happens when you make decisions without me? " Mia was quiet. So, you stopped making decisions without him. She said for 4 years. Garrett said, "Yeah, he said it like a man who had just counted something and found the number worse than he'd expected for himself. " He didn't say it. She heard it anyway.
Maya was quiet for a moment. She thought about what her father had said on the backst steps about the years when leaving felt impossible about how understanding a thing was different from excusing it. "Your stepfather thinks my father has something from 1999," Mia said. Something that happened at a meeting. A photograph Garrett's face confirmed it before he said anything.
He knew about 1999 or enough of it. He's been worried about it for years. Garrett said when your dad came here, he panicked. I've never seen him panic before. He looked at Mia.
What's in the photograph? That's between my father and Sheriff Dempsey. Mia said something moved through Garrett's face. Relief, she thought. The relief of a mansed boy who was exhausted by the weight of being inside a secret and had just been told he didn't have to hold it alone anymore.
Dempsey's straight, he said. She's the one person in this county Bo can't touch. I know, Mia said. He looked at her for a long moment. I could.
He stopped. Then if someone were to talk to Dempsey officially about things they'd seen and heard in that house over 12 years, his voice was careful. Would that help? Mia looked at him. She thought about her father saying word for I think.
She said carefully that you should make that decision for yourself, not for me, not because of anything I said. She held his gaze. If you know things that are true and you tell them to the right person, it's not doing someone a favor. That's just doing the right thing. Garrett was quiet.
The parking lot was almost empty now. The last car pulled out. The football field lights clicked off in the distance. I'm sorry, Garrett said, for what I did to you. All of it.
Mia looked at him, took a moment to decide what was true. I know, she said. That doesn't fix it yet, but it's a start. She walked to the pickup where Ry was waiting. She got in, put on her seat belt.
Ray looked at her. She told him word for word. He drove home without saying much, but she saw in the set of his shoulders as he drove that something had shifted. Sunday at 8:00, Dot's place. Dot had the back booth ready, coffee made, the front door locked, shades half-drawn, the particular intimacy of a public space made private.
Sheriff Norah Dempsey came in the back entrance, the one through the kitchen. She sat across from Rey. Trisha Owens, Ray's lawyer, sat to his left. She'd driven up the night before as promised Dot sat at the end of the table. She'd been included without discussion.