Page 94 of In the Dark of the Past

“I need to be alone for a while,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Not because I’m done with you.” She said it directly, looking at me. Making sure I understood. I felt something loosen a bit inside me. “But because I have to figure out how to hold both things at once. Namely, what I know about you now and what this letter says about my father. And I can’t do that with you standing in the room.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

She nodded once, the movement tight.

I picked up the envelope from the nightstand and held it out to her.

She took it.

Her fingers closed around it, and something in her face shifted. It didn’t get softer or harder, it just changed. The way an expression changes when someone’s decided something.

“I’ll call you,” she said.

“I’ll be there,” I said, went downstairs, and let myself out.

The night air was cold and clean and too open after the closeness of that room. I stood on the porch for a moment under the light, the maple tree shifting in the dark.

All this time, I’d carried the Bennett case without fully examining what I’d actually done in it. I’d built a version of the story I could live with. That I was young, I followed procedure, I reported the discrepancies, it wasn’t my fault that the lead investigator buried them. All of that was technically true.

But it didn’t account for the part where I’d looked at two gaps in a fabricated paper trail and chosen the explanation that let me help close the case.

I walked to the SUV and got in, sitting for a minute without starting the engine.

I thought about Sergeant Bennett. The way he’d moved through the department when I was new, with the ease of someone who had earned the right to take up space. Solid. Careful. He was the kind of cop I wanted to be. The kind who asked questions and waited for real answers.

And then I’d investigated him.

And he’d died.

And I’d spent nine years making peace with both of those things in a story where he was guilty, and I was just doing my job, because the alternative—that he was innocent and I’d been handed a fabrication and hadn’t looked hard enough to see it—was a thing I hadn’t known how to carry.

Sitting in the cruiser outside his daughter’s house with her mother’s letter somewhere inside and the maple tree moving in the breeze, I understood that I would have to learn how.

I started the engine.

She’d said she’d call.

I believed her.

I drove home, and I waited.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

River

I sat in my mother’s bedroom for an hour after Finn left.

The envelope was back on the nightstand, the curtains still hung, the reading glasses she’d never put away still rested by the book. I sat with all of it and let the hour do what hours do when you stop trying to manage them. It moved through me instead of around me, and when it was done, I was still sitting on the edge of the bed, but something had shifted in the way things shift after you’ve finally stopped holding them at arm’s length.

My father hadn’t done what they’d accused him of.