Page 175 of This is Why We Lied

“I know, but—”

Amanda cut him off with a sharp look. “Dave disappeared the day after his mother committed suicide. He hasn’t tried to contact Jon. His phone has gone dark. He hasn’t been back to his trailer. He was not at the campground. The North Georgia Field office put a notice on the wire. I’m sure he’ll show up eventually.”

Will rubbed his jaw. “He’s been through a lot, Amanda. The only family he’s ever known just disintegrated.”

“His son is still here,” she reminded him. “And don’t forget about what he did to his wife. I’m not only speaking to the physical and verbal abuse. Dave knew years ago that Mercy wasn’t responsible for Gabbie’s death. He hid it from her as a means of control.”

Will couldn’t argue with that part, but there were plenty others. “Amanda—”

“Wilbur,” Amanda said. “Dave McAlpine is not going to suddenly become a better man. He will never be the father that Jon needs. There is not a piece of logic, or a sage bit of advice, or a life lesson, or any amount of love, that will turn him around. He lives the way he does because he chooses to. He knows exactly who he is. He embraces it. He won’t change because he doesn’t want to change.”

Will rubbed his jaw again. “A lot of people would’ve said that about me when I was a kid.”

“But you’re not a kid anymore. You’re an adult.” She rested her phone on her desk. “I know better than most what you had to overcome to get here. You have earned your happiness. You have a right to enjoy it. I will not allow you to throw all of it away in some misguided attempt to save everyone. Especially the ones who do not want to be saved. You cannot serve two masters. There’s a reason Superman never married Lois.”

“They were married in 1996, in Superman: The Wedding Album.”

She picked up her phone. She started typing again.

Will waited for her to respond. Then he remembered how good she was at ending conversations.

He stuck his hands in his pockets as he walked down the stairs. There was a lot to unpack about Jon, but Will was more of a mover than an unpacker. He reached for the exit door with his injured hand. The knife wound had Frankensteined. Sara had not been kidding about that infection. One month out, he was still taking pills that were approximately the size of a hollow-point bullet.

The lights were off on his floor. Technically, Will was off the clock, though he noticed Amanda hadn’t chastised him for staying late. What she’d told him was wrong, and not just because Will was clearly more Batman than Superman.

Change was possible. Will had spent his eighteenth birthday in a shelter, his nineteenth in jail, and by his twentieth, he was enrolled in college. The grade-school kid who was routinely sent to detention for not reading all of the assignment had graduated with a college degree in criminal justice. The only difference between Will and Dave was that someone had given Will a break.

“Hey,” Faith called from her office.

Will stuck his head in. She was using a lint roller to get the cat hair off her pants. Faith had brought the McAlpine cats down to Atlanta to put them in a shelter. Then Emma had seen them and one had gotten out of his carrier and killed a bird and that was the story of why Faith had two cats now, one named Hercule and the other named Agatha.

She said, “Some jackass kid at daycare showed Emma TikTok. She keeps trying to steal my phone.”

“It was bound to happen sooner or later.”

“I thought I had more time.” Faith tossed the lint roller into her purse. “Meanwhile, I’ve got the FBI knocking down my door because they want to expedite Jeremy’s application. Why is everything happening so fast? Even frozen dinners get to sit a minute after you pull them out of the microwave.”

Will felt his stomach growl. “I watched the interview with Jon. You did a good job.”

“Well.” Faith lifted her purse onto her shoulder. “I finished reading Mercy’s letters to Jon. They broke my fucking heart. I could’ve written them to Jeremy. Or Emma. It’s just Mercy trying to be a good mom. I hope Jon gets to a place one day where he can read them.”

“He’ll get there,” Will said, mostly because he wanted it to be true. “What about Mercy’s diary?”

“Exactly what you’d expect from a twelve-year-old girl who was in love with her adoptive brother and terrified of her abusive father.”

“Anything from Christopher?”

“He’s still saying he had no idea what was going on. Bitty never touched him that way. I guess he wasn’t her type.” Faith shrugged, but not to dismiss it. Because it was too much. “Mercy saw it happening with Dave, you know? Some of it’s in her diary. A lot of it’s in the letters. Bitty would stroke Dave’s hair or Mercy would walk into a room and Dave would have his head in Bitty’s lap. Or he’d be rubbing her feet or massaging her shoulders. It felt weird—I mean, Mercy calls that out herself, that it’s weird—but she never really put it together.”

“Abusers don’t just groom their victims. They gaslight everybody around the victim so that if you say anything, you’re the one who’s sick.”

“You wanna know sick, you should read some of the texts between Bitty and Jon.”

“I did,” Will said. He’d felt so nauseated that he’d skipped lunch.

“She hated babies,” Faith said. “Do you remember Delilah telling you that Bitty wouldn’t even pick up her own kids? She let them stew in their dirty diapers. And then Dave comes along and he’s exactly her type. Or she ages him down to make him her type. Do you think Dave knew that she was abusing Jon all along?”

“I think he put it together in the dining hall, and he did what he could to save his son.”

---