The words came out weighted differently than he'd intended, like something heavier than he'd meant to put down. Ren looked at him steadily. Do you know what he asked you to do was wrong, she said. Silence? Yes, he said.
Just the one word. Quietly. Then why? He looked at her with the expression of someone being asked to explain something that had always just been the weather. Because I've been doing what he asks since I was 9 years old, he said.
Because in my house, doing what he asks is what keeps things safe. For my mom, he stopped. His eyes went briefly to his left forearm where the old scar ran pale and thin below his sleeve. I stopped making decisions without him when I was 14. I've been doing it that way for 4 years.
He said it the way a person says something when they've counted and found the number worse than expected. Ren was quiet 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. About how both could be true at the same time.
Your stepfather thinks my father has something from 1919. She said something from a meeting. A photograph. Dalton's face confirmed it before he said anything. He knew about 19 to99 or enough of it.
He's been worried about it for years. Dalton said, "When your father showed up here, he panicked. I've never seen him panic before. " "Not like that. " He looked at Ren. "What's in the photograph? " "That's between my father and Sheriff Marsh," Ren said. Something moved through Dalton's expression.
"Not what she expected. Relief, she thought. The relief of someone who'd been carrying part of a secret and had just been told they didn't have to hold it alone anymore. Marsh is straight, he said. She's the one person in this county Pierce can't reach.
I know, Ren said. He looked at her a long moment. If someone were to talk to her, he said carefully officially about things they'd seen and heard in a specific house over 12 years. His voice was precise, each word placed deliberately. Would that help?
Ren looked at him. She thought about what her father had said word for word. I think she said equally carefully that you should make that decision for yourself, not for me, not because of anything I've said. She held his gaze. If you know things that are true and you tell them to the right person, that's not doing someone a favor.
That's just doing the right thing. Dalton was quiet. The parking lot had emptied around them. The football field lights clicked off in the distance, one bank at a time. I'm sorry, he said for what I did to you.