“Because your grandfather came to me that night,” she said, “while the search party was outside, and he said if I opened my mouth I’d lose both my children. He said accidents happened near rivers. He said little boys wandered.” She swallowed. “He told me to choose carefully.”
The room tilted.
Gabe saw himself at four, asleep under a thin blanket on his grandfather’s couch while adults shouted Ellie’s name into the dark. Saw his mother’s face the next morning, gray and emptied out. Saw the way she had clung to him for months afterward, the way she flinched whenever he played near the creek.
“He threatened me,” Diane said. “And I believed him because I knew exactly what he was.”
“You should’ve told me.”
“I was trying to keep you alive.”
The anger in Gabe had nowhere to go. It rushed at his father, at the sheriff’s office, at the town, at every Sunday dinner where Arnold had carved ham while people passed him the rolls. It rushed at himself for not seeing sooner, though he’d been a child. Most of all it rushed toward the dead man who had taken Ellie and then gone on living, respected and praised, while the rest of them shaped their lives around a wound that never closed.
